U.S.-HUMAN RIGHTS: Argentine Torture Case Breaks Precedent

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep 17 1996 (IPS) - Victims of serious human rights abuses abroad may gain damages in the United States if their home governments use the U.S. court system to pursue or harass them.

That is the thrust of the settlement of a 14-year-old lawsuit reached Friday between the government of Argentina and Jose Siderman, a prominent victim of the Argentine military’s “dirty war” against alleged subversives in the 1970s.

This case marks the first time that a foreign government has been successfully sued in the United States for abuses committed on its own territory.

“We think it’s a very significant case for the future in that we have broken through what had previously been an insurmountable barrier — sovereign immunity for foreign governments in the United States,” said Paul Hoffman, one of four lawyers who represented Siderman.

Until this case, victims of serious rights abuses abroad could sue only foreign individuals for their treatment under a 200-year- old law, called the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789. While the Act has been used successfully in recent years against prominent military figures in Guatemala, Indonesia, Rwanda and Haiti, defendants have avoided paying damages by remaining outside U.S. territory.

At the same time, foreign governments — against which defendants are much more likely to collect damages — could be sued only if the abuse took place in the United States.

The most notable example was the successful lawsuit carried out against Chile by the surviving family members of Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean defence minister who was killed when his car was blown up in Washington 20 years ago this week.

In that case, U.S. courts found that the perpetrators of the assassination were acting under orders from the Chilean government of President Augusto Pinochet, and the family was able to collect damages.

In the Siderman case, a federal appeals court ruled that, by pursuing the plaintiff in the U.S. court system, the former military government of Argentina had done enough in the United States to warrant lifting its sovereign immunity.

Siderman, an 85-year-old retired businessman who fled Argentina after one week’s detention and torture by the military in 1976, will reportedly receive about six million dollars from the government of President Carlos Menem.

While that amount is only a fraction of the fortune confiscated from his family after its flight to the United States, Hoffman, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told IPS Monday that “Mr. Siderman and his entire family are extremely happy with the settlement.”

“They sincerely believe that justice has been done,” he added, noting, however, that “no amount of money can replace what they lost.”

Siderman was the owner of a real estate and construction empire reportedly worth more than 25 million dollars. He was first kidnapped and held for ransom by a left-wing guerrilla group in 1974 and then abducted by soldiers from his apartment in San Miguel de Tucuman in Mar. 1976.

What followed was a week of brutal torture by soldiers under Gen. Antonio Domingo Bussi, the junta’s chief administrator in Tucuman, who was elected last year as governor of the northern province.

Siderman believes he was targeted primarily because he was Jewish. The Argentine military was notoriously anti-Semitic and even used Nazi symbols in its prisons and torture centres. Surviving victims of its “dirty war” have reported that, among prisoners, Jews were generally treated much more harshly than non- Jews.

Upon his release, Siderman was warned by his captors that he should leave the country or risk being killed. He soon fled, moving to Los Angeles where his daughter was studying at the time.

Several days after his departure, the regime issued an international warrant for his arrest for alleged fraud. At the same time, an Argentine judge put his company in receivership.

While on vacation in Italy in 1981, Siderman was arrested on the warrant and held for seven months until an Italian judge threw the case out of court. When he returned home to Los Angeles, he found that the junta had filed papers with the U.S. federal court, seeking evidence against him in another case. Siderman then filed his own claim under the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act.

“Argentina committed a terrible blunder by going after Siderman in the U.S. courts,” said Juan Mendez, general counsel for Human Rights Watch, who was himself a torture victim in Argentina’s “dirty war.”

By resorting to the U.S. courts to help it prosecute Siderman, the government effectively “waived” its immunity from being sued by him, according to a 1992 U.S. appeals court judgment.

“Because the Argentine government used the U.S. courts to persecute and harass Mr. Siderman, it couldn’t invoke sovereign immunity,” said Jenny Green, a lawyer with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

Even after the appeals court decision, however, the Argentine government tried repeatedly to get the case dismissed, according to Hoffman. “They did everything they could to block the case from going to trial,” he said, noting that it was not until Aug. 31 — just two days before the date set for the trial — that the Menem government sent representatives to negotiate a settlement.

Mendez hailed the settlement, noting, however, the irony that a democratically elected government will have to pay for the acts of the military junta.

Hoffman said that only “time will tell whether this case will be used to enable other human rights victims to sue their governments” in the United States. He argued that governments who harass their victims in the United States by, for example, filing false police reports against them, will make themselves vulnerable.

“Foreign governments have to be careful about going after people here,” he said.