Bouterse secures key victory

“A new beginning”. This was how Suriname’s President Desi Bouterse described the recent approval of an amendment to the 1992 amnesty law which effectively allows him to escape investigation for alleged human rights violations committed under his military rule (1980-1991). The insistence by Bouterse, who took office in August 2010, that the new law was intended to “heal the whole nation, not just one part of it” has, unsurprisingly, failed to wash with local civil society groups, leading human rights organisations or Suriname’s former colonial ruler, the Netherlands, who all denounced it as a cynical argument for imposing impunity.

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