Of the various aims and objectives the amnesty process sets out to achieve – truth recovery, victim empowerment and perpetrator accountability – the last-mentioned may well be the most important. This is due to the direct connection between perpetrator accountability and justice. Responses to crime which fail to discover the truth or to treat victims appropriately are certainly seriously flawed; but they are not necessarily unjust. By contrast, official reactions to wrongful conduct which fail to hold perpetrators accountable for their deeds are not merely flawed: they cannot credibly claim to constitute justice mechanisms at all.

This is so irrespective of whether one's conception of justice is ‘restorative’ or ‘retributive’. True, retributive and restorative theories of justice are based on different views of the overarching goal of the criminal justice process – in the case of the former, the public valuation of the crime through the imposition of the ‘deserved’ penalty on an offender; in the case of the latter, the ‘restoration’ of disturbed relationships between victims, offenders, and the wider community. But whatever their different conceptualisations of the broader or ultimate aim(s) of official reactions to crime may be, these theories share a belief in the fundamental importance of perpetrator accountability. They thus require that there be some response to culpable violations of other citizens' rights that addresses and involves the perpetrators of these acts.