The impossible machine: A genealogy of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

In the twentieth century South Africa, the British jurisprudential notion of indemnity was adopted but changed in character because it no longer retrospectively absolved police of crimes committed against the colonized (provided they were done in good faith and the public interest); astonishingly, it now prospectively legalized the illegality before the event. [...]not only did indemnity became the normal state of affairs in apartheid South Africa, forming the foundation of a racist sovereignty, it became the legal basis for 'state criminality and human rights abuses that rendered the invention of an institution like the TRC necessary'. [...]under apartheid 'indemnity reversed itself: instead of legalizing illegality, it illegalized legality itself, reconciling the rule of law with precisely the sort of arbitrary exercises of violence that the rule of law was designed to restrain and oppose' (p. 9).