Around 3 pm on October 16, 1998, a Fax from Madrid arrived at Scotland Yard headquarters in London. The document signed by Judge Baltasar Garzón asked for the arrest and extradition to Spain of the Chilean. The retired general, who had headed the 17 -year -old bestial (from 1973 to 1990), was hospitalized in a London clinic and was preparing to return the day after his country, where he enjoyed immunity guaranteed by a general amnesty decreed in 1978.
Upon learning of the news, Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño reacted ready: “An earthquake!” He exploded. It didn’t overdo it.
For the first time in the four corners of the world, it resorted to the principle of universal jurisdiction that enables the justice of other nations to punish crimes against humanity, genocide, crimes of war and torture committed by heads of state in a country, despite the existence of local amnesty laws.
Baltasar Garzón founded his act in the episode of the disappearance, in the early days of the 1973 military coup, of a Spanish citizen employee of the United Nations.
The comings and goings of the Pinochet case are told in “38, London Street”, by the jurist and English writer Philippe Sands, who intertwines them with the adventures of a former Nazi officer. Refugee no, he puts himself to serve the dictatorship. Through the two stories, Sands reconstructs the horrors of repression and the struggle of jurists as Garzón for prevailing the idea that the victim of crimes such as dictators against their citizens is not a particular person born in this or in that country, but the whole human human.
The principle of universal jurisdiction is the touchstone of the International Criminal Court, established in 1998 and an important part of the international human rights regime. This, in turn, is the fragile portion of the so -called Liberal International Order, a complex system of rules that Western democracies have created to deal with the multilateral scope with the problems of peace and war; economic relations (financial and commercial); of the impossible threats of overcoming national states (such as climate crisis or pandemics). It will not say that such institutions limit but do not suppress the policy of power of the great powers, which transgress it from time to time.
If, by an earthquake, the liberal international order to crumble, the human rights regime will be the first to be buried. This is what is at stake today when Trump invests against rules that, on better days, the US has helped create and endorsened, although sometimes they have run over them.
That is why they are surprising the indifference with which part of the Brazilian democratic left faces the demolishing action promoted by the US representative and the undisguised sympathy with which he sees China’s rise to the condition of world power that could take the place of the US. For if this is effective, universal jurisdiction to judge dictators and international human rights protection instruments will go to the trash can of history.
Excellent news for the aspiring Pinochet that Brazilians know by name and coup vocation.
Gift Link: Did you like this text? Subscriber can release seven free hits from any link per day. Just click on F Blue below.
