On October 16, 1998, London police arrested General Pinochet on a warrant from a Spanish judge for human rights crimes. In the ten years since, the world has become a smaller place for brutal despots.
John Laughland suggests that human rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch, are more concerned about the conviction of former heads of state than about them getting fair trials. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Chile's extradition of former president Alberto Fujimori back to Peru to stand trial on allegations of death squad killings and corruption shows that the world is becoming a smaller place for people who commit atrocities.
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet made the case for Chile’s membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council during a visit to Human Rights Watch’s New York headquarters today.
The Chilean Supreme Court’s decision to extradite former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori to Peru to face trial for human rights abuses is welcome and unprecedented, said Human Rights Watch today.
The ruling by Chilean Judge Orlando Alvarez denying Peru’s request for the extradition of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori is fundamentally flawed, Human Rights Watch said today.
A legal attack on a hormone now underway in Chile will help determine whether Chilean teenagers – and older women – are more or less likely to give birth to unwanted children. A group of Chilean parliamentarians is currently seeking to derail Chile’s state-of-the-art medical protocols regarding emergency contraception. But their efforts are fuelled by scientific ignorance and could have dire consequences for Chilean women’s health and well being.
A casual visitor to the drab committee room in the British Parliament building where the fate of General Augusto Pinochet was decided during five weeks in 1998 and 1999 might have been excused for missing the case's historical significance. The law lords in business suits sat in front of robed and wigged barristers. Cartons of legal materials were piled high on chairs and tables. Most of the audience couldn't even see their lordships, much less understand their endless questioning about the finer points of British statutes and international conventions.
General Augusto Pinochet died without standing trial. But justice caught up with him in every other sense. Indeed, the "Pinochet precedent" has made the world a smaller place for the perpetrators of the worst atrocities.
Former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, who died in Santiago on December 10, pioneered the use of “disappearances” as a tool of repression in South America. But his arrest in London in 1998 also jumpstarted the use of national courts to try foreign leaders for abuses committed in their own countries.