Bassil: A general amnesty must be specific, and we must not entrench the principle of impunity

Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Gebran Bassil said in “A Minute with Gebran” that there are Lebanese Islamists who have been imprisoned for years without trial and have been wronged because of their beliefs. He said: “We are against their ideology, but we support granting them amnesty because no real crime has been proven against them.”

Bassil stressed that “we support amnesty for those who fled to Israel because we passed a law for them that was never implemented, but we are certainly against amnesty for anyone who killed a Lebanese soldier,” noting that “exempting Syrians who killed army personnel through contact or collusion with the Lebanese authorities does not justify exempting Lebanese who carried out the killing of military personnel.”

He added: “We are also against a general amnesty, not because we oppose forgiveness, but because we cannot build a state if, every time, we erase crimes of murder, theft and drugs as if they never happened.” Bassil stressed that “we must not entrench the principle of impunity for the sake of political gains for some,” saying: “It is enough that those who stole Lebanese people’s deposits have not been punished, and that those who committed political assassinations have been pardoned or overlooked.”