Reuters/Madrid
Spanish judge Baltazar Garzon, testifying at his own trial, told a court yesterday that relatives of victims of right-wing dictator General Francisco Franco had a right to justice despite a 1977 amnesty.Garzon, best known for securing the 1998 London arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, is accused of abusing his powers in investigating some 114,000 suspected murders during the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War and the four-decade dictatorship that followed.“They were describing a systematic elimination ... and thousands of those remain ‘disappeared’ today,” Garzon, sitting at a small wooden table, told seven Supreme Court justices.The prosecution – brought by private parties, not the state – claims that Garzon violated the amnesty.He argues that the forced disappearances under Franco were crimes against humanity that could not be the subject of an amnesty under international law.It is one of three criminal cases against him that divided public opinion in Spain.While some people back the trials, many believe that they are a politically-motivated attempt to bring the high-profile human rights campaigner down or to prevent a truth commission into the dictatorship which ended with Franco’s death in 1975.If found guilty of any of the charges against him, the 56-year-old could receive a 20-year ban from working as an investigating magistrate in Spain.Thousands of people rallied in Madrid on Sunday against the trials. Among them were Spaniards who say that their relatives and friends were murdered or tortured by Franco’s troops.“We’re confused, terrified, indignant, embarrassed,” poet Luis Garcia Montero told demonstrators in a square near to the Supreme Court where Garzon is on trial.Unionists, left-wing politicians, human rights groups, legal experts and artists like film directors Pedro Almodovar have all criticised the prosecution.Garzon is also accused of having benefited financially from courses in New York sponsored by big companies and having breached defendants’ rights by allowing the recording of conversations between lawyers and their clients in a corruption case involving members of the centre-right People’s Party.Garzon was once admired across the political spectrum for his investigations of Basque separatists ETA and for uncovering a dirty war backed by the Socialist government in the 1980s but he alienated many when he tried to probe Francoism.Many analysts are astonished that the Supreme Court agreed to a trial on the basis of complaints from two right-wing organisations – Clean Hands and Liberty and Identity.The state public prosecutor was against it.“It would be difficult not to conclude political prejudice has come in to this,” Paul Preston, a British historian on Spain, told Reuters.“The judiciary in Spain, although there are a number of liberal judges, is still for all kinds of reasons ... to put it mildly, extremely conservative, if not actively pro-Francoist.”Garzon ordered the investigation after associations of Franco victims asked for help tracking down the remains of relatives suspected to have been buried in mass graves.Historian Preston estimates 200,000 civilians were killed far from the frontline in the war and thousands more in the dictatorship, a situation he has dubbed “The Spanish Holocaust” in his latest book on the war and its aftermath.