The Pinochet Precedent and Universal Jurisdiction

Abstract

In October 1998, General Augusto Pinochet, military ruler of Chile from 1973 to 1990, was arrested in a London clinic on orders of a Spanish court. That court, acting under a Spanish law permitting universal jurisdiction over certain crimes, has since 1996 been investigating the top leadership of the Chilean and Argentine militaries for their role in the murder, disappearance and torture of thousands of real or perceived opponents throughout the Southern Cone of South America. Pinochet's detention merely exposed to the world the tip of a larger iceberg. The Pinochet case and the related cases in Spanish and other European courts provide a fascinating case study of the benefits and risks of universal jurisdiction. My talk today will focus on a few aspects of these cases: first, the jurisdictional bases of the Spanish and other European suits in national law, and the implications of this grounding in national law; second, the effects of the Spanish cases, in particular, within Chile and Argentina; and third, some of the particular factors that have made the Spanish prosecutions relatively successful. The Spanish cases began when members of the Spanish Union of Progressive Prosecutors filed a complaint in April 1996, accusing members of the Argentine military junta of genocide, terrorism, and other crimes regarding the detention and subsequent disappearance during the 1970s of a number of Spanish citizens and citizens of Spanish descent who were living in Argentina. The case was filed under Spanish laws allowing public interest organizations, as well as aggrieved individuals, to file and maintain criminal complaints even without the backing of, and in this case over the strenuous opposition of, the state prosecutors office. Thus, a group of exiles and human rights activists, backed by the Spanish political party United Left and by professional associations, could maintain the prosecution without state consent, merely with a commitment by the state not to interfere with the independence of its own judiciary. Article 23.4 of the Spanish Judicial Law allows prosecution of nonSpanish citizens for some crimes committed outside Spain, among them

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 130 citations exist upstream.