Europe, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

RIGHTS: Conviction of Argentine Rights Abuser Opens Door to International Justice

Tito Drago

MADRID, Apr 19 2005 (IPS) - The 640-year sentence handed down Tuesday to former Argentine naval officer Adolfo Scilingo in Spain “opens another door to international justice, for trying perpetrators of crimes against humanity,” human rights activist Monica Cavagna told IPS.

Spain’s Audiencia Nacional court convicted Scilingo, 58, of crimes against humanity, including murder, illegal detention and torture, committed during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

Although he was sentenced to 640 years in prison, he will serve no more than 25, with time off for good behaviour and work, under Spanish law.

The prosecutors were seeking a sentence of 9,138 years.

The former navy captain was sentenced to 21 years for each of 30 murders, five years for illegal detention and five years for torture.

The court found him guilty of participating in the illegal detentions and torture committed in the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), Argentina’s most notorious clandestine prison camp, in 1976 and 1977.

It also ruled that he took part in the “death flights” in which political prisoners were loaded onto navy aircraft, drugged, stripped naked and thrown alive into the sea. Hundreds of people were forcibly “disappeared” in this fashion.

Scilingo confessed to being on two of the flights, and was convicted of murder in the deaths of the 30 people killed on those two occasions.

The sentence also stated that the accused took part in burning the bodies of political prisoners who were killed in ESMA, which the military human rights abusers sarcastically referred to as “asados” (barbecues).

Activist Cavagna, the president of the Spanish-based Argentine Association of Human Rights (AADH), who was in the courtroom when the verdict was read out, told IPS that she felt enormous peace and satisfaction at that moment, and that like many of those around her, she was unable to contain her shouts of joy.

“Thousands of us have been working for this for years, and we are happy, because justice is being served, and because this sets a precedent in Europe and at the international level, since it was an ordinary Spanish court that tried an Argentine criminal,” she said.

“Anyone who has committed similar crimes, or who commits them in the future, can be arrested and tried, by invoking this historic precedent,” she added.

Two amnesty laws passed in Argentina in the 1980s, which put an end to prosecutions of members of the military charged with human rights violations, continue to stand in the way of legal action in the South American country.

Although the Argentine Congress repealed the two laws in 1998, legal challenges questioning the constitutionality of the congressional move are still pending a Supreme Court decision.

Because military human rights abusers were let off the hook in Argentina, the principle of “universal justice” came into play.

In international law, the concept of universal jurisdiction holds that every state has an interest in bringing perpetrators of the worst crimes against humanity to justice, regardless of where the crime was committed, or of the nationalities of the perpetrators or victims.

Scilingo plans to appeal the sentence to Spain’s Supreme Court.

When asked if she was satisfied with the 640-year sentence, Cavagna said “it’s not a question of one year more or less, because in Spain, long sentences are not served in their entirety anyway.”

Alba Lanzilotto, a member of the Argentine human rights group Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, was also celebrating the sentence. “Somewhere in the world, the justice system had to react to crimes against humanity,” she said.

“Fortunately, this is happening in Spain, the country we consider our second home since it took us in when we were forced to go into exile,” she added.

The Abuelas (grandmothers) came together during the dictatorship to search for their missing grandchildren, the sons and daughters of political prisoners who were taken from their parents, most of whom were among the de facto regime’s 30,000 victims of forced disappearance.

Like Cavagna, Lanzilotto said the ruling sent out a clear message to criminals around the world, that “they will have no refuge; their crimes will not go unpunished.”

Argentine lawyer Carlos Slepoy, who took exile in Spain, where he continues to live, underlined in a conversation with IPS that Scilingo was the first Argentine human rights abuser to be tried in this country.

He was also the first to actually be present at a trial held outside of Argentina, “which makes this sentence a historic development,” added Slepoy, who represented families of victims of Argentina’s de facto regime in the trial.

Other members of the Argentine military have been tried in absentia and sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity committed during that country’s “dirty war”. Former generals Guillermo Suárez Mason and Santiago Riveros were convicted in Italian courts, and former naval captain Alfredo Astiz was sentenced in France.

The next step to be taken by the Spanish courts with respect to prosecutions of Argentine military officers will be the trial of former naval captain “Ricardo” Miguel Cavallo, who was extradited to Spain from Mexico in June 2004.

He is in prison in Spain and faces charges of genocide and terrorism.

Also to be tried is Ricardo Oliveros, a former Argentine army intelligence officer who lives in Alicante, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast 400 kms from Madrid.

Oliveros was arrested on Apr. 16 and will testify on Apr. 27 in the same court that heard the case against Scilingo.

Scilingo came to Spain voluntarily in 1997, to testify before prosecuting Judge Baltasar Garzón, who became famous the following year when he attempted without success to have former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet extradited to Spain.

In 1995, Scilingo’s account of the “death flights” was published in the book “The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior”, by Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky.

When the former navy officer came to Spain, Garzón had him arrested.

During the trial Scilingo pretended to faint, declared a hunger strike that lasted for only a few days, refused to testify, and recanted his testimony, claiming that it was all a fabrication aimed at ensuring that those guilty of the crimes committed by the dictatorship would be brought to justice.

However, the court not only took into account his initial confession, but also called a number of survivors of the repression, relatives of victims, and human rights activists to testify, some of whom did so by videoconference from Argentina and other countries.