Spanish judge defends Franco-era crimes probe

A protester holds pictures of people missing during Spain’s 1936-39 civil war during a demonstration to support Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon in front of the Spanish Supreme court in Madrid yesterday

World-renowned Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon defended yesterday his opening of an investigation into Franco-era crimes as he battled Supreme Court charges of abuse of power.
Garzon, who earned global fame with an attempt to extradite Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet from London, found himself in the dock, accused of breaching an amnesty for such crimes.
Victims’ families who filed a case with him 2006 had described disappearances, illegal detentions and killings, which amounted “in some cases to crimes against humanity, genocide,” he told the court in Madrid.
The 56-year-old judge is being prosecuted for ordering the investigation in 2008 into the disappearance of 114,000 people during Spain’s 1936-39 civil war and General Francisco Franco’s subsequent dictatorship.
He is charged with exceeding his powers on the grounds that the alleged crimes were covered by an amnesty agreed in 1977 as Spain moved towards democracy two years after Franco’s death.
Garzon argues that the acts were crimes against humanity and therefore not subject to the amnesty agreed by Spain’s main political parties.
If convicted he would not go to prison but could be suspended from the legal profession for up to 20 years, putting an end to his career.
Garzon was testifying shortly after the Supreme Court refused to dismiss the case, despite both the prosecution and defence agreeing that he had done nothing wrong and the charges should be shelved.
The submissions “do not have sufficient material weight to justify the cancellation of the investigation,” said the ruling agreed by a majority of the seven judges.
Garzon has become a hero to many human rights activists and victims of the Franco period.
More than 100 protesters rallied outside the court in his defence, waving banners reading “Justice” and displaying black-and-white photographs of Franco’s alleged victims.
“We are here because we are ashamed that a judge who tried to judge the crimes of Francoism should be the first to sit on the bench of the accused and that the Supreme Court should try to condemn it,” said one activist at the rally, Pio Maceda.
“We are here to show our support for justice and to demand justice,” he said. “In the judiciary there are still some elements of the old regime, this case is an embarrassment to Spain and the world.”
Garzon came to international prominence in 1998 when he ordered the extradition of Pinochet from Britain to face charges of human rights abuses.
The judge has also pursued members of the former dictatorship in Argentina, indicted Osama bin Laden and probed abuses at the US prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Garzon was suspended from his duties at the National Court, Spain’s top criminal court, in May 2010 and currently works as a consultant at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
The trial has become a centre for heated debate about how Spain deals with a dar period in its history.
Garzon took advantage of his testimony to note the absence of research into the Franco-era victims.
“To my suprise, there were no data about the civil war,” the judge told his lawyer, after listing a string of official institutions that were unable to give him an estimate of the number of disappeared.
Garzon said that in the end his judicial investigation had to use research by associations for historical memory and the testimony of victims to come up with a figure of at least 114,000 disappeared.

AFP