(Washington, D.C.) - President Eduardo Frei should grant a pardon to journalist José Ale Aravena, who was convicted last month of "insulting" the former president of the Supreme Court in Chile, Human Rights Watch said today.
The Supreme Court gave Ale a suspended 541-day prison sentence on February 15 for having "insulted" the court's former president, Servando Jordan Lopez. Ale was accused of defamation of a public authority, under art. 6(b) State Security Law.
The Frei government has proposed to repeal the article but the bill has been stuck in Congress for almost a year. Human Rights Watch said that Ale's conviction violated his right to freedom of expression, and that the composition of the Supreme Court chamber that heard the case did not offer him guarantees of impartiality.
"We are asking President Frei to rectify this injustice as a final act of his mandate," said José Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch. Frei's term will expire on March 11, 2000. "He could make a valuable contribution to Chilean democracy by doing so."
Vivanco said he would ask President-Elect Ricardo Lagos to give top priority to repealing the State Security Law, and to grant an amnesty to all journalists and politicians who have been convicted or charged under it.
A November 1998 Human Rights Watch report, Limits of Tolerance: Freedom of Expression and the Public Debate in Chile, documented the cases of twenty-five people who have been charged under this law since the return to democrcacy in Chile in 1990. In April last year, journalist Alejandra Matus had to leave Chile to avoid arrest in a similar case and is now in the United States seeking political asylum. Her book, The Black Book of Chilean Justice is still banned in Chile due to another criminal complaint by Justice Jordan.
