RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Court Deals Another Blow to Military’s Impunity

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Nov 10 2001 (IPS) - An Argentine appeals court has upheld a lower court’s annulment of the laws that in the 1980s gave legal amnesty to some 1,000 military personnel and police who committed human rights violations during the country’s most recent dictatorship (1976-1983).

The Federal Chamber of Argentina, the appeals court of second instance, issued a ruling Friday that ratifies the lower court’s decision to declare the amnesty laws “null and void” for a human rights case involving victims of the dictatorship.

“Argentine justice has dealt a blow against terrorism at a time when intemperate voices can be heard justifying methods of state terrorism as a way to deal with new threats,” said the president of the locally-based Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), Horacio Verbitsky.

In a lawsuit for a case of illegal appropriation of a minor during the dictatorship, CELS, a human rights organisation founded in 1976, had requested that the case be expanded to cover those responsible for the kidnapping and disappearance of the child’s parents.

María Victoria Poblete was kidnapped in 1976 when she was just eight months old. She was seized alongside her parents, José Poblete of Chile and Gertrudis Hlaczik of Argentina, who were tortured and then “disappeared” by agents of the dictatorship. Lt. Col. Angel Landa, who has been indicted, had illegally taken custody of the young girl.

In February, federal judge Gabriel Cavallo accepted CELS as the complainant in the case, and in March, in what is considered a historic ruling, he declared the annulment of the so-called “Full Stop” and “Due Obedience” laws that had protected those who were accused of kidnapping, torturing and disappearing María Victoria Poblete’s parents.

The men implicated in the case, former police Juan Antonio del Cerro and Julio Simón, appealed Cavallo’s ruling before the Federal Chamber asserting that they could not be tried retroactively for crimes for which they had been exonerated – an argument commonly wielded in similar cases here in the late 1990s.

But that justification began to loose credence over the years. As CELS chief Verbitsky stated in March after Cavallo issued the ruling, questions of national penal law have been surpassed by international law, which tends to reject arguments that allow crimes against humanity to go unpunished.

The progress made in lawsuits in other countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden) against members of the Argentine military, in addition to the arrest and subsequent indictment of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, are examples of this trend.

The three judges of the appeals court were unanimous Friday in upholding the annulment of the controversial 1986 Full Stop law and the 1987 Due Obedience law, for the Poblete case exclusively.

The court stated in its ruling that, “in the current context of the constitutionality of human rights, the invalidation of the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws does not constitute an alternative, but rather an obligation.”

In Argentina, which does not have a court entrusted with interpreting the constitution, each judge has the right to rule in favour of annulling a law in a specific case, though not for all similar cases. But CELS activists are confident that this ruling, if upheld now by the Supreme Court of Justice, will ultimately set a precedent.

Each similar case involving human rights victims of the dictatorship would have to follow the same legal course.

Verbitsky, well known in Argentina as a journalist, celebrated the fact that the appeals court had declared “the impunity laws invalid and unconstitutional,” saying he hopes that they will no longer stand in the way of carrying out justice in cases of crimes against humanity.

The dictatorship was responsible for the kidnappings and disappearances of at least 11,000 people according to official records, though human rights organisations put the figure closer to 30,000.

The former commanders of the armed forces who were found guilty of the human rights violations were pardoned in the early 1990s, shortly after their subordinates were released as a result of the amnesty laws.

But the efforts of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, an organisation created in order to look for the children who had disappeared during the dictatorship (they have located 70 in the more than 400 cases), put three former military commanders back behind bars for their role in the kidnapping, appropriating and falsifying the identity of minors.

Based on one of the legal claims filed by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which included the case of the disappearance of Victoria Poblete, CELS filed a lawsuit against the men responsible for the disappearance of Poblete’s parents.

The lawsuits had been initiated by the families of the victims in a bid to find out the fate of their relatives, though did not include the possibility of condemning and imprisoning those responsible.

But Cavallo’s ruling, and the fact that the appeals court upheld the decision, could represent a legal window for new trials against military personnel who kidnapped, tortured and assassinated the dictatorship’s political opposition and other citizens merely on suspicions of affiliations with leftist groups.

“Argentine justice has put things in their correct place by establishing that under no circumstances can the violation of human rights be justified, and that in a state of law, those responsible for such atrocities must be brought to trial,” said Verbitsky.