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.”
Bassil affirmed that “every time there has been an amnesty without political accountability, the truth was lost, people lost trust in the state, and crime was repeated.”
Bassil said: “A general amnesty blurs the line between the criminal and the victim, entrenches the principle of non-accountability, and encourages wrongdoing, and that is the most dangerous aspect of the matter.” He added: “The argument of prison overcrowding can also be addressed by reducing the number of Syrian prisoners and by holding judges who fail in their duties accountable, as there is no justification for a judge not to comply with the trial deadlines stipulated by law.”
He called for holding any judge who fails to issue rulings on time accountable and for lowering their rank.
Bassil stressed that any amnesty must be specific and must not come at the expense of the blood of the martyrs, as the state is not built on forgetting, but on justice.
