ARGENTINA: Purging the Legal System of Dictatorship Accomplices

•  buenos aires
• Wednesday, September 07, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Thanks to the memory of witnesses and survivors of the 'dirty war', as well as the tireless efforts of human rights organisations, judges and prosecutors implicated in dictatorship-era human rights crimes have generally been kept from taking part in the trials.

And information provided by the survivors and witnesses is now being used to gradually purge these judges and prosecutors from the legal system. The most recent case is that of Otilio Romano, a federal court judge in the western province of Mendoza, who despite numerous accusations against him managed to stay in his post until late August.

There was evidence that Romano was involved in 76 cases of kidnapping, torture and forced disappearance between 1975 and 1983. Nevertheless, he evaded legal action for years.

But charges have now been brought against him for 17 crimes against humanity, and the Consejo de la Magistratura — a high council made up of judges, legislators and lawyers — decided to suspend and impeach him, on the grounds that he served the cause of state terrorism by failing to investigate crimes against humanity as a prosecutor during the regime.

Colleagues of his like Luis Miret, Rolando Carrizo and Guillermo Petra Recabarren, who had kept their posts until recently, were also suspended and are facing charges for denying justice to numerous victims of the dictatorship.

Carolina Varsky, a lawyer with the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), told IPS that her human rights group has long denounced the complicity of judges and prosecutors during the dictatorship, but that 'only in the last decade has the issue begun to be discussed.

'Until well into the 1990s, denunciations (of the collusion) were disregarded by the judicial branch, which protected judges who were accomplices of the dictatorship,' she said. Many of the judges in question were actually appointed during the de facto regime.

But 'over the last decade, this issue began to be debated, and in the past few years it steadily gained momentum' as human rights cases came to trial, said Varsky, the head of CELS' 'Memory and the Struggle Against Impunity' programme.

Human rights trials were resumed after the amnesty laws for military personnel adopted in the mid-1980s were overturned in 2005 and the presidential pardons granted to imprisoned members of the former military junta in 1989 and 1990 were struck down in 2007.

However, human rights groups complain that accomplices of state terrorism still form part of the justice system, and could even be sitting as judges in courts that are trying crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service