“Lebanon Debate” – Basma Atwi
The General Amnesty Law explicitly excluded from pardon crimes that were referred to the Judicial Council, whether judgments were issued or not. Thus, these crimes, including the crime of the Beirut Port explosion, remained subject to prosecution and trial, and the issuance of the Amnesty Law did not lead to the dropping of the public lawsuit regarding them or the erasure of the criminal liability arising from it.
However, excluding these crimes from the general amnesty did not exclude them from the reduction of penalties stipulated by the law itself. Article Three was clear and explicit when it specifically addressed crimes that were not included in the amnesty, and stipulated, unlike any other text, that crimes committed before the law came into effect, whether judgments were issued or not, if they were not included in the amnesty, their penalties would be replaced so that the death penalty would become twenty-eight years in prison, and life imprisonment with hard labor would be seventeen years in prison, while all other penalties would be reduced by a third.
Accordingly, a very important paradox arose as a result of the law: the crime excluded from the amnesty remained subject to prosecution and trial, but at the same time it became a beneficiary of the exceptional reduction of the penalty. The exception contained in Article Two prevents the dismissal of the public lawsuit and the erasure of the penalty, but it does not prevent the application of Article Three. Rather, the latter was originally designed to address crimes “that were not covered by the amnesty.”
This result is not limited to people who were sentenced before the law came into effect. The legislator explicitly stipulated that the reduction would apply whether “judgments were issued or not,” which makes the provisions of Article Three also applicable to trials that are still pending and have not reached final rulings.
Here, the repercussions of the law on the Beirut Port explosion file are particularly apparent. The defendants in this case do not benefit from pardon in the sense of dropping prosecution, given that the case has been referred to the Judicial Council. However, if their responsibility is proven and judgments are issued against them, they fall in principle within the exceptional system for reducing penalties introduced by Article Three, unless there is another special case that prevents the reduction in accordance with the text.
Therefore, for a person who, according to the criminal description and the sentence issued against him, could have resulted in a life sentence, the penalty specified under the law became seventeen years in prison, and whoever owed the penalty was a temporary penalty, would benefit from having it reduced by a third. As for the penalty that amounted to death, it became twenty-eight years in prison. This effect does not require the existence of a ruling prior to the issuance of the law, but rather extends to the ruling that will be issued later by the competent judicial authority for a crime that occurred before the law came into effect.
The importance of this issue lies in the fact that the amnesty law is no longer limited in its effects to the people and crimes “covered by the amnesty.” In addition to the general amnesty, he established a general and exceptional system to reduce penalties for crimes that he himself excluded from the amnesty. Thus, there are two levels of benefit: a group that benefits from the dismissal of the public lawsuit and the erasure of the penalty, and a second category for which the lawsuit is not dropped, but benefits from a substantial reduction of the penalty when it is sentenced.
This does not change the fact that the crime referred to the Judicial Council is included in the list of excluded crimes. The exception was mentioned in Article Two of the general amnesty, while Article Three independently arranged legal effects for crimes not included in this amnesty. If the intention was to deprive crimes referred to the Judicial Council of a reduction as well, the law would have had to include an explicit exception to them from Article Three, which is not what happened in the text that was issued.
An additional time discrepancy also appears between the provisions of the law. Article One limited the amnesty to crimes committed before March 1, 2026, while Article Three linked the reduction to crimes committed before the law’s effective date. Therefore, the timeframe for reducing the sentence has become, according to the letter of the text, wider than the timeframe for the general amnesty itself.
This result acquires an exceptional dimension when applied to the crime of the Beirut Port explosion. The law kept the file outside the amnesty and prevented the prosecutions arising from it from being dropped, but at the same time it pre-amended the punitive scale that could be applied to those proven responsible. Therefore, saying that “port crime is excluded from the amnesty law” does not reflect the entire legal picture; It is more accurate to say that it is exempt from the amnesty that drops prosecution, but it is not exempt from the exceptional reduction of penalties that the law decided for crimes not covered by the amnesty.
Thus, the text, in its effective form, arranges a precise and sensitive legal result: those accused of crimes referred to the Judicial Council, including those proven responsible for the crime of the Beirut Port explosion, do not benefit from the dismissal of the public lawsuit, but they benefit, when the conditions of Article Three are met, from a reduction of the legally prescribed penalty. This is not a result derived by analogy or by expanding the interpretation of the pardon, but rather a direct result of the separation that the legislator himself established between “pardoning the crime” and “reducing the punishment for the crime that was not included in the pardon.”
