When it comes to saying that about Guatemala, I do so with my breath held, but this is certainly good news:
Spain's courts may try cases of genocide and
crimes against humanity committed outside the country, whatever the
nationality of the victims, the Constitutional Court ruled.
'The principle of universal jurisdiction
takes precedence over the existence or not of national interests,' the
court said, quashing a 2003 decision by the Supreme Court relating to
human rights abuses in Guatemala.
The Supreme Court had rejected a submission
by 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, saying that Spain's
judiciary could only deal with crimes committed against Spanish
citizens.
The Constitutional Court said it supported
Menchu's case that 'Spain should investigate crimes of genocide,
torture, murder and illegal imprisonment committed in Guatemala between
1978 and 1986.' [my emphasis]
It was clear shortly after the formal end of Guatemala's Dirty War that it would be impossible for the civilian government of Guatemala to prosecute crimes against the abuses committed by a string of military dictatorships. This situation reached its reductio ad absurdum moment when Efraín Rios Montt, arguably the most brutal of Guatemala's former dictators and father-in-law to a US Congressman, managed to pack a court to vote favorably on his right to run for president, despite a law restricting those who had participated in coups from running for president.
Legal circumstances now hardly seem any better:
A proposed law putting military personnel beyond the reach of civilian
courts has drawn strong opposition from Guatemalan human rights
activists haunted by the excesses of military rule.
Backed by the Guatemalan Republican Front and other rightist parties,
as well as the country’s powerful lobby of active and retired army
generals, the bill would modify Guatemala’s 19th-century code of
military conduct and transfer prosecutions for crimes committed by
soldiers and officers to military courts.
Human
rights activists and judicial experts here contend that the law could
halt a number of prosecutions against military officials on corruption
charges.
‘‘This law creates a climate of impunity,” said Iduvina
Hernández of Security in Democracy, a military watchdog group. ‘‘It’s a
law written in a spirit of cowardice that favors the corrupt.”
Hernández
and other activists here believe the law would halt the prosecutions of
officers charged in a $100-million embezzlement case and corruption and
human rights charges against former President Efrain Rios Montt, who
ruled during an especially bloody chapter of Guatemalan history.
Social circumstances hardly seem favorable for such a prosecution, either:
Groups of armed, masked men patrol poor neighborhoods. Threatening messages are left on mutilated bodies. Young men disappear, their bodies found later in a ditch.
These acts weren't unusual during Guatemala's 36-year civil war. But people thought the bloodshed would taper off when the war ended in 1996.
Nine years later, though, human rights observers are finding alarming similarities between that violence and what's now happening to gang members and alleged delinquents.
Some say on- and off-duty police officers are involved, while others point fingers at private security guards and vigilante groups. But the killings have raised concerns about a "social cleansing" effort - one that is backed by citizens fed up with crime and insecurity and often willing to take the law into their own hands. Homicides in Guatemala rose 40 percent from 2001 to 2004, according to the government's human rights ombudsman's office.
"The population is tired of the government's lack of solutions to the violence," says Veronica Godoy, who heads the Public Security Monitoring and Support Group.
That hardly seems like the sort of environment where a nation would try those for crimes against humanity; especially such acts as committed against the weakest and poorest members of Guatemala's population: the Maya.
Under the circumstances who could possibly complain that those who have suffered so greatly should seek justice where it stands a chance to be heard.
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