HUMAN RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Now It’s Up to the Supreme Court

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 21 2003 (IPS) - The families of the victims of the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983) are celebrating Thursday’s annulment of the amnesty laws that protected the military regime’s torturers and killers, and are looking to the Supreme Court to clear the way for bringing them to justice.

The families of the victims of the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983) are celebrating Thursday’s annulment of the amnesty laws that protected the military regime’s torturers and killers, and are looking to the Supreme Court to clear the way for bringing them to justice.

The Senate spent 10 hours debating before finally abolishing what are known as the Full Stop Law, of 1986, and the Due Obedience Law, of 1987, with 43 senators voting in favour of annulment, seven against and one abstention. There were 21 senators absent.

The senators thus ratified the move of their fellow lawmakers in the lower house, who voted last week to overturn the two amnesty laws.

At around 2 a.m. local time Thursday, in and around the Argentine Congress, families of the dictatorship’s victims, human rights activists and former political prisoners could be seen embracing each other and crying in happiness. Hundreds of people were at hand, after closely following the historic Senate session.

“It is very exciting! We waited a long time for this moment,” Sara Steimberg said Thursday in a conversation with IPS. Her son, Luis Steimberg, was kidnapped in 1976, at age 22, when he left the house to go to the cinema. He and a friend were both “disappeared” by the dictatorship’s repressive apparatus.

Steimberg, 80, laments that she could not participate in the ongoing vigil outside Congress staged by mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared and by activists of leftist parties demanding the abolition of the amnesty laws.

The Senate spent less time deliberating on another matter, unanimously voting to give constitutional force to Argentina’s adhesion to the International Convention on International Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, adopted by the United Nations in 1968.

The annulment of the two laws appears to open the way for bringing the dicta torship’s torturers to justice, despite the fact that, according to most legal experts, the congressional vote does not in itself authorise the re-opening of trials for human rights crimes committed during the dictatorship.

But experts say the votes by the upper and lower houses of Congress, strongly backed by President Néstor Kirchner himself, represent a forceful political gesture aimed at the Supreme Court, which has yet to rule on various cases related to the constitutionality of the two laws.

It was not a simple process to abolish the two laws. Leftist deputy Patricia Walsh had proposed the annulment two years ago.

Up until the final debate began, many senators agreed with Vice-President Daniel Scioli, president of the chamber, who said it was “hardly serious” to repeal a law created by the Congress itself, and planted doubts as to whether Congress can act retroactively.

Although the vote triggered tensions between Scioli and Kirchner, it is in keeping with the repeated demands of local human rights organisations and the desires of the president himself, expressed shortly after he took office May 25, to bring the agents of the dictatorship to justice.

Another push came last month when Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón requested the arrest and extradition of 45 Argentine military officers for trial in Madrid for the deaths of hundreds of Spanish citizens during Argentina’s “dirty war”.

Garzón rose to international fame in 1998 for his failed attempt to extradite former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) to Spain on charges of crimes against humanity.

Garzón’s arrest orders for the Argentine officers also prompted Kirchner to overturn the decree impeding extradition of Argentines accused of crimes committed in Argentina during the dictatorship, signed by Fernando de la Rúa in December 2001, just days before he resigned from the presidency.

The former dictatorship chiefs and hundreds of their subordinates have been formally accused – among other crimes – of “disappearing” some 11,000 people. Human rights groups put the total of disappeared at around 30,000.

Senator Jorge Yoma, of the governing Justicialista (Peronist) Party, recognised that the annulment of the amnesty laws is “controversial”, though he considers the move “enormously important morally and ethically.”

Hundreds of people celebrated in the streets outside Congress after the vote tally was announced.

“I can no longer stand for very long, but I feel very gratified by this victory,” Steimberg told IPS. She is a member of the organisation Families of the Detained and Disappeared, and works with other local human rights groups.

“One must have patience” in waiting for the Supreme Court to make a decision on the constitutionality of the laws, said the elderly activist. “There is no reason to rush,” she added, saying she is confident that the case about her son’s disappearance will now be heard.

In 1995, Steimberg endured the televised confession of former sergeant Víctor Ibañez, who said he regretted having thrown several of the dictatorship’s prisoners into the Río de la Plata from an airplane. Among those prisoners was Luis Steimberg.

“It was horrible. That perpetrator of genocide thought he could ask us for forgiveness,” Steimberg says. But, she adds, at least since that day she knows where her disappeared son is buried.

The laws now annulled by Congress had put a stop to the human rights trials that involved some 2,500 members of the military for crimes committed during the dictatorship.

The Full Stop Law, sponsored in 1986 by then-president Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989) under pressure from the military, set a 60-day deadline for criminal complaints to be filed and for judges to hear the testimony of defendants and witnesses in human rights cases.

Until then, the Alfonsín administration had pursued measures that had led to the conviction of the dictatorship’s commanders. Most were given life sentences, but were subsequently pardoned by Carlos Menem, president of Argentina from 1989 to 1999.

After the Full Stop Law was passed, several judges hurriedly began to summon members of the military to testify. A group of soldiers reacted in anger, staging an armed uprising in 1987.

Although the revolt was put down, in its wake the Due Obedience Law was introduced by the executive branch and passed by Congress, thus ending the prosecutions of all human rights violators who were ”following orders.”