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Baltasar Garzón Real (born October 26, 1955 in Torres, Jaén, Spain) is a judge in Spain. Garzón currently sits on Spain's criminal court (Sala 5 of the Audiencia Nacional, also known as National Court), the Audiencia Nacional. He has been the subject of controversy.
[edit] International casesGarzón came to international attention on October 10, 1998 when he issued an international warrant for the arrest of former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet over the alleged deaths and torture of Spanish citizens during his tenure; the Chilean Truth Commission (1990-91) report was the basis for the warrant, although Pinochet's alleged crimes took place well outside the jurisdiction of the Spanish court. Eventually it was turned down by the then British Home Secretary, Jack Straw, who refused Garzón's request to have Pinochet extradited to Spain. He has repeatedly expressed a desire to investigate former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in connection with a plot in the 1970s known as Operation Condor. [1] In April 2001 he requested that the Council of Europe to remove the immunity from prosecution enjoyed by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy as a member of the Council's parliamentary assembly. This was rejected. Garzón also filed charges of genocide against Argentine military officers on the disappearance of Spanish citizens during Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship. Eventually Adolfo Scilingo and Miguel Angel Cavallo were prosecuted in separate cases. Scilingo was convicted and sentenced to over 1000 years incarceration for his crimes.[2] At one point, Garzón had a public and very heated argument with Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) over the sovereignty of the Basque Country. [3] In December 2001, Garzón launched an inquiry into the offshore accounts of Spain's second largest bank BBVA for alleged money laundering offences. In January 2003, he fiercely criticised the United States government over the detention of al-Qaida suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He also campaigned strongly against the 2003 Iraq war. Garzón issued indictments for five Guantanamo detainees, including Spaniard Abderrahman Ahmad. Ahmad was extradited to Spain on February 14, 2004. [edit] Spanish casesIn 1993, he went into politics, running for the Cortes Generales (the lower house of the Spanish parliament) on the party list of then ruling party PSOE. He was also declared head of a strengthened National Plan Against Drugs by Spanish prime minister Felipe González. He resigned this post shortly after, however, complaining of lack of support from the government. His later investigations helped the conviction of a PSOE minister as head of the GAL state terrorist groups. He also investigated Jesús Gil, former mayor of Marbella and owner of Atlético Madrid, on grounds of corruption. Garzón has also fought against ETA: he has instructed many trials against alleged ETA members. In July 1998 he instructed a case against Orain SA, the Basque communication company that published the newspaper Egin and owned the radio station Egin Irratia. Garzón ordered the closure of both and sent some of the company officers to prison, due to their alleged links with ETA. These charges were later dropped for lack of evidence, and the journalists were released. Many years later Mr Garzon imprisoned them again under the allegation of being part of ETA in a "broader" sense. Egin was allowed to reopen years later by the Audiencia Nacional, after all charges were found without foundation, but Orain SA was already bankrupt, not having been allowed to run operations and publish for years. In February 2003 Garzón also ordered the closure of Egunkaria, the only newspaper wholly written in Basque language, once again alleging links with ETA, although the evidence was never presented. There was an outcry of public opinion against the closure, especially within the Basque country and abroad. Prominent intellectual figures including Salman Rushdie and Noam Chomsky condemned the closure.[citation needed] In October 2002 Garzon suspended the operations of the Batasuna party for three years, alleging direct connections with ETA. In February 2008 he also ordered the ban of two Basque nationalist parties, which had filled the political space of Batasuna: EHAK and EAE-ANV on the same grounds. On October 17, 2008, Garzón formally declared the acts of repression committed by the Franco regime to be crimes against humanity, and accounted them in more than one hundred thousand killings during and after the Spanish Civil War. He also ordered the exhumation of 19 unmarked mass graves, one of them believed to contain the remains of the poet Federico García Lorca.[4][5] On November 17, 2008, Garzón said that he was dropping the case against Franco and his allies after state prosecutors questioned his jurisdiction over crimes committed 70 years ago by people who are now dead and whose crimes were covered by an amnesty passed in 1977. In a 152-page statement, he passed responsibility to regional courts for opening 19 mass graves believed to hold the remains of hundreds of victims. [6] [edit] Bibliography
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