Kathryn Sikkink - The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics

The Justice Cascade

HOW HUMAN RIGHTS PROSECUTIONS ARE CHANGING WORLD POLITICS

Kathryn Sikkink

W. W. Norton & Company

New York London

In memory of Ellen Lutz (19552010), friend, coauthor, human rights advocate, from whom I learned so much about law, justice, and friendship.

CONTENTS

Part II
SPREADING IDEAS ABOUT INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTABILITY

Pa rt I II
DO HUMAN RIGHTS PROSECUTIONS MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

Part IV
CONCLUSIONS

Introduction

I dont remember when I first heard it would be possible to hold state officials criminally accountable for human rights violations. No one mentioned it in 1976 when I lived in Montevideo, Uruguay, as a university exchange student. In 1973, the elected president of Uruguay, Juan Mara Bordaberry, and the Uruguayan military had overthrown the democratic government, closed down the Congress and the Supreme Court, and started imprisoning and torturing their opponents. Bordaberry continued to serve as president, and his participation gave a veneer of legitimacy to the new authoritarian regime. Once known as the Switzerland of Latin America for its small size, long democratic tradition, and mature social welfare policies, Uruguay quickly gained notoriety as the torture chamber of Latin America.

I talked with people in Uruguay who had been imprisoned and tortured. It was hard for them to foresee an end to the dictatorship, and no one imagined that someday it would be possible to judge those responsible for human rights violations and send them to prison. At no time was such foresight more difficult than in 1976, when the country saw its darkest moments. In May of that year, Uruguayans were terrified to learn of the murders of two of the most revered Uruguayan opposition politicians living in exile. If even they could be murdered, no one was safe.

These assassinations took place in Argentina, where several leading opponents to Bordaberrys coup had sought refuge following the closure of the Uruguayan Congress. These opponents included Senator Wilson Ferreira Aldunate, the former presidential candidate for the main opposition Blanco Party; Congressman Hctor Gutirrez Ruiz, the Speaker of the House; and Senator Zelmar Michelini, one of the most eloquent spokesmen of the leftist opposition coalition, the Broad Front ( Frente Amplio ). The exiles situation took a grim turn with the Argentine military coup in March 1976. Their relative safety evaporated, and they started to receive death threats. Michelini planned a trip to the United States, where he intended to meet with members of the U.S. Congress and staff from Amnesty International to brief them on what was happening in Uruguay. The plane ticket was reserved, and the U.S. government had already granted him a visa. But the Uruguayan foreign minister, Juan Carlos Blanco, gave explicit instructions to deny the renewal of Michelinis passport, so he was unable to travel. Without current documentation, his situation in Argentina was even more precarious. He wrote to a friend in the United States: Since I dont have legal status in Argentina, I am now practically a man without a country, a prisoner in this land.... You cant imagine my anger, my grief, my impotence....

On May 18, 1976, groups of armed men kidnapped Gutirrez Ruiz and Michelini from their apartments in Buenos Aires. Three days later, both men were found murdered, with signs of torture on their bodies. When the kidnappers bungled a similar attempt to capture Wilson Ferreira, he fled to London. He left an open letter to the new military president of Argentina, General Jorge Videla, describing at length the kidnapping and murders of Gutirrez Ruiz and Michelini. Ferreira understood that the kidnappings had been an action coordinated between the Uruguayan and Argentine military governments. The letter ended: When the hour arrives of your own exile, which will arrive, have no doubt, General Videla, if you seek refuge in Uruguay, a Uruguay whose destiny will be once again in the hands of its own people, we will receive you without cordiality and affection, but we will grant you the protection that you did not give to those whose deaths we are today grieving.

Wilson Ferreira, in his hour of greatest despair, could envision a distant future of democracy in his country and in Argentina when General Videla would be forced into exile and Uruguay would be again in the hands of its people. But, at that time, he could not imagine accountability for the human rights violations he had just witnessed. He did not say that he awaited a time when Videla would be extradited or tried for his crimes. Ferreira assumed that in the future, as in the past, leaders responsible for human rights violations would go into exile abroad, where they would be given protection, if not affection. This had long been the political tradition in Latin America, where military coups were a commonplace instrument of politics. Even the very viciousness of the crimes he had just witnessed did not change Ferreiras perception that leaders would not, or could not, be judged for their crimes. But Ferreira was not alone in being unable to imagine criminal prosecutions of state officials. No one I spoke with in Uruguay mentioned the possibility of prosecuting Bordaberry or the Uruguayan military. In a series of interviews and conversations since that time, Ive asked friends and colleagues in Uruguay when they first thought it was viable to hold human rights prosecutions. They point to different dates, but never before 1983, when Argentine human rights movements started publicly demanding trials for past violations in Argentina.

President Bordaberry also believed he could not be judged for his actions. In a speech in December 1974, he said of the military and the June 1973 coup: the armed forces must enjoy supreme tranquility, knowing that their stance of having accompanied and supported the government in the historic events of June 1973 cannot be judged by the citizenry.... It would be like assuming you could judge a man who broke the formal law to defend his mother, in this case, his motherland. And this stance cannot be the object of a judgment.

Thirty-two years after this speech, Bordaberry found that he could in fact be the object of judgment. In 2006, a Uruguayan judge indicted Bordaberry and his minster of foreign affairs, Juan Carlos Blanco, ordering them into preventive prison to await trial for the murders of Gutirrez Ruiz and Michelini. In 2010, the eighty-one-year-old Bordaberry was convicted and sentenced to thirty years in prison. Other top officials of the dictatorial government, including Blanco, and Gregorio Alvarez, the military president after Bordaberry, shared his fate, having since been convicted and sentenced to prison terms of twenty to twenty-five years.

The story of Jorge Bordaberry is just one of many stories of state officials for whom the unimaginable had occurred: criminal accountability for violations of human rights. A watershed moment for such accountability came in October 1998, when General Augusto Pinochet of Chile was arrested in London by British police executing a Spanish extradition request. The Spanish court wanted Pinochet to stand trial in Spain for crimes committed in Chile during his military dictatorship. No one predicted this arrest, certainly not in London, where Pinochet had just weeks before taken tea with his old friend Margaret Thatcher. The Law Lords (the British Supreme Court) decided that Pinochet could be extradited to Spain.