Legal Rationales for Releasing Pinochet

Picciotto, Sol s.picciotto at lancaster.ac.uk
Sat Nov 7 17:01:02 PST 1998


Fred West was a quiet suburb dweller who turned out to be a mass murderer with many bodies buried under his cellar and garden.

I read last week's court decision on Pinochet, which was interesting, as the judges rejected the technical arguments they could have used for refusing the Spanish extradition request. The reason they chose was in a sense the most politically arguable, that it is up to the Chilean people, or maybe world opinion (through the International Criminal Court, about to be set up, without US government support), to put violators of human rights like Pinochet on trial. Notice that the sovereign immunity argument they accepted would not protect anyone except a head of state, so it may cover Milovanovicz but not Mladic. I think there is a 50-50 chance that the appeal will succeed, in that the judges may choose to hand the hot potato back to the politicians (who gave it to them in the first place, by not blocking the Spanish warrant, and in fact making sure the police formally arrested Pinochet on a Friday night, which takes some doing when everyone is headed out of town for the weekend). I hear the panel which is deciding the appeal is fairly internationally-minded, and may choose to take the view that the international 'rule of law' is above national politics. This would force the politicians (namely, Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, who would have to decide whether to allow the warrant to go through, having taken the advice of the Foreign Affairs Minister Robin Cook, who has to consider the impact on British business and political interests abroad) to take responsibility for the final decision. One way or another it is pretty certain Pinochet will be heading back to Chile soon, but he's had a scary time, which must have put the wind up some other torturers, plus it has given some support to Chileans who suffered in those years, and had been forced to keep quiet and accept an 'orderly transition'.

cheers

sol



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