Sparks: Cambodia's former opposition leader receives royal pardon for 27-year sentence
A pardon merely suspends the symptom; the constitutional architecture that allows a twenty-seven-year sentence for politics is the disease requiring a permanent structural correction.
The supreme art is to imprison a rival without fighting, then release him to demonstrate that the battle was never his to win.
Why do ten million hands continue to build the very walls that confine one man, when they could, with a single shared refusal, leave the mason with nothing to construct?
In the courts of Delhi and the palaces of Fez, I have observed that a ruler's mercy often follows a period of calculated and undeniable display of his power.
Observe how the river, dammed and forced, carves a deeper channel, just as a suppressed idea, once released, flows with greater force through the political terrain.
Every pardon granted from above is merely a confession whispered in the dark by the pardoner, who needs the prisoner's gratitude more than the prisoner needs his freedom.
If one man's thought can be deemed treasonous, then the center of truth is not fixed, and infinite worlds of dissent must orbit every official sun.
The pardon neither establishes innocence nor confirms guilt, but merely reveals the emptiness of the legal grounds upon which the sentence first depended.
Power never concedes anything without first demonstrating its absolute capacity to take it away, and a pardon is but the second act of that demonstration.
'The royal pardon generously corrects the judicial error' - a sentence whose passive construction pardons the pardoners before the ink is dry.
It is a charming custom here to first construct an elaborate dungeon for a man, then, with great ceremony, hand him the key and call it civilization.
A most efficient system is herein proposed: first, render political opposition illegal, then display magnificent clemency by not punishing it quite so severely as the law allows.
That same concentrated interest which procures the sentence will, when its calculations change, procure the pardon, each transaction dressed in the language of justice.
Observe the small farmer, who first barricades his neighbor's well and then, during a drought, offers a single cup of water as a testament to his own benevolence.