The NYer: A Judge On Trial (Baltasar Garzon)

[EFerrari]

A Judge On Trial



Last month, Baltasar Garzón, a Spanish judge, came to town to receive the Human Rights Activism award. It is a new annual honor given jointly by the Puffin Foundation, a New Jersey-based arts-oriented non-profit, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, an educational organization devoted to preserving the history of American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. The award-with a hundred-thousand-dollar prize-comes at a particularly difficult time for Garzón, who has been suspended from his job amid extensive legal troubles of his own.

Garzón is widely known for his pursuit of international human-rights pariahs like Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, but Garzón himself is now on trial in a case that stems from Spain’s own troubled history. In 2008, Garzón issued a judicial edict accusing General Francisco Franco and thirty-four accomplices of the disappearance and systematic killing of more than a hundred and fourteen thousand people during the Spanish Civil War and in the decade that followed. Many of the victims were buried in fosa comunes, or mass graves. As part of the ruling, Garzón ordered the exhumation of nineteen graves, including one believed to contain the remains of the poet Federico García Lorca. (Jon Lee Anderson wrote about the dispute over Lorca’s grave in The New Yorker.)

A week after Garzón issued his order, Spain’s chief prosecutor, Javier Zaragoza, challenged it, partly on the grounds that it violated a series of amnesty laws passed in the late nineteen-seventies as part of the process of restoring democracy to Spain. This agreement to not examine the past later became known as the pacto del olvido (pact of forgetting). In November, 2008, the country’s highest court of appeals ruled 14-3 against Garzón. The matter appeared to be settled, but two months later a far-right organization filed a criminal suit against Garzón, accusing him of “judicial prevarication,” knowingly overstepping his authority, and violating the pacto del olvido. Garzón’s defense is that crimes against humanity cannot be absolved by a self-given, retroactive immunity. Garzón is now on trial in the Spanish Supreme Court. He faces disbarment for twenty years if convicted.

The day before he accepted the award in New York, Garzón spoke about his legal problems over a lunch of tapas and paella at La Nacional, one of the last remnants of “Little Spain,” a tiny stretch of West Fourteenth Street that was once filled with refugees from the Spanish Civil War. That war’s long shadow also helped shape Garzón’s judicial worldview.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/06/baltasar-garzon.html#ixzz1OiTvq8oL

[gratuitous]

1. "Crimes against humanity cannot be absolved bya self-given, retroactive immunity"

Or at least, they shouldn't be. Too bad our current government (and a disturbing percentage of our citizenry), Executive, Legislative and Judicial, appears to be more on the side of the Francoists than on the side of humanity.