In a society where corruption is commonplace, a part of the population will have participated in a large number of corrupt acts. In addition, corrupt acts that took place longer ago can only be remembered inaccurately. If, as a condition for amnesty, it is demanded that all corrupt acts be reported in full, this cannot realistically be implemented in this strictness by part of the population.
It is important that notoriously corrupt individuals in particular participate in this program. They, too, should be given the chance of an amnesty if they are sincere and serious about making a new start without corruption. The condition for an amnesty must therefore be formulated realistically and implemented pragmatically.
A realistically formulated condition could look something like this: The corrupt acts that a person admits to are sorted according to their offense amount. Among the corrupt acts with the ten largest offense amounts, a person may "forget" at most one. If the person can be proven to have concealed more than one corrupt act in that category, he or she will be prosecuted under the normal procedure. If a person can be proven that the information on the corrupt acts is incorrect, the person must justify the discrepancies. Only if this justification is comprehensible will the amnesty be granted. The greater the cumulative amount of offenses committed by a person, the more closely the person's statements will be examined.
In order to clarify whether a person meets the conditions for amnesty, an authority with the appropriate human resources must be established.
In the most radical version of an amnesty for past corrupt acts, the persons who confess to their corrupt acts go unpunished. In particular, these persons can keep all the assets acquired through corrupt acts. Such a radical version may be rejected by representatives of civil society because it is considered unfair. In a less radical version, the cooperating individuals have to pay a certain percentage of the offense amount (e.g. 3%) as a penalty tax. In this way, the acceptance of such an amnesty could be increased, especially in civil society. To this end, the amount of the penalty tax would have to be negotiated in a transparent political process (e.g. in parliament).
According to Chene's literature review (2019), amnesties have been offered predominantly for human rights abuses. Such amnesties are successful when they are conditional and have the purpose of facilitating the transition of political power after the end of an internal conflict.
In the few cases of amnesties for corrupt acts, the experience was poor. The purpose of such amnesties was to protect the political elite from prosecution and thus preserve the political balance of power. For this reason, these amnesties did not lead to an end to corruption, but on the contrary led to a greater willingness to commit corrupt acts.
The literature provides the following justifications for amnesties for corruption offences:
The danger of amnesties for corrupt acts is that they can be abused by the political elite and damage the public's trust in the rule of law. From these considerations, it is possible to derive boundary conditions that must be guaranteed in order for such an amnesty to achieve the desired goal:
The concept elaborated above fully implements these conditions:
The amnesty proposed here can be compared to a certain extent with tax amnesties. As in the case of a tax amnesty, the aim is to facilitate the return to legality of persons who have committed illegal acts in the past. In the case of a tax amnesty, the aim is also to increase future tax revenues because the declared assets increase (as a result of the amnesty).
As in the case of a tax amnesty, it is assumed that the criminal act is disclosed. The major difference arises from the fact that in the case of a tax offense only one person is involved, whereas in the case of a corrupt act at least two persons are involved. By disclosing the corrupt act, a person not only provides information about his own offense, but also about that of the other person involved. This person acts as a whistleblower. Accordingly, the (positive) social consequences of an amnesty for corrupt acts, assuming a guilty plea, are much greater than those in the case of a tax amnesty. The principle of "Amnesty in Exchange for Guilty Plea" potentially makes the entire corruption complex of a society transparent at a stroke.