While beset with difficulties and confronted with pressures from many sides, there is one charge which cannot be levelled against the amnesty process: that it failed to attract applications from its intended constituency. Quite the contrary: the Committee was approached by the perpetrators of many of the atrocities that defined the final phase of the power struggle between the different political players. The subject matter of its rulings stretches across such volatile events as the Boipatong Massacre, the Shell House Shooting, the killing of Chris Hani, the Church Street and the Magoo's Bar bombings, and countless acts of state violence, including letter-bomb attacks, police torture and deaths-in-custody, and cross-border attacks on supposed ANC bases in neighbouring countries. Moreover, in deciding on such applications the Committee did not merely sit in judgment on single and isolated incidents. Indirectly, it had to consider key strategic choices made by the parties during the conflict that have remained controversial ever since.

The starting point for any analysis of the Committee's practice must be the decisions themselves. But many decisions contain no more than a description of the conduct for which the applicant sought amnesty, an unelaborated finding that the applicant has complied with the amnesty requirements of the TRC Act and (in the operative part of the decision) the pronouncement that amnesty is granted to the applicant either for some specified offences or delicts, like ‘murder’ or ‘unlawful possession of firearms’, or summarily for ‘all offences or delicts’ committed by him during the incident(s) for which he applied for amnesty.