(Washington, D.C.) - Human Rights Watch today hailed the Chilean Supreme Court's decision to reject the appeal by Senator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte against a lower court ruling stripping him of his parliamentary immunity. The verdict, in which an overwhelming majority of the court upheld the lifting of immunity, means that Pinochet should now face trial for human rights violations committed at the start of his seventeen-year dictatorship. Although Chilean law sets a low threshold for the lifting of immunity (simply requiring that there be grounds for suspicion of involvement in crimes), only two such actions have been successful in the last thirty-five years. The verdict therefore has considerable legal and symbolic significance, even if Pinochet's health rules out eventual conviction for his crimes.
"This verdict is a tribute to the tenacity of the Chilean human rights movement, which has pursued the goal of accountability year after year," said José Miguel Vivanco, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Americas division. "It inspires confidence in Chilean democracy, and indeed helps rebuild trust in its judiciary. Yet this outcome would have been hard to imagine had British courts not broken the spell of Pinochet's immunity by declaring him subject to international justice."
Legal actions in Chile against the former dictator gained momentum after U.K. authorities held him for seventeen months under house arrest in Britain while four states sought his extradition. Although Pinochet was returned to Chile in March 2000 on medical grounds, he found himself in a very different country than the one he had left. After years in which justice was a rarity, during 1999 the Chilean courts opened a spate of prosecutions of former generals and lower officers for human rights violations. In July 2000, in another important decision, they convicted a former secret police agent to life imprisonment for murder.
With the Supreme Court's decision today, more such convictions may be expected. The ruling gives further impetus to the legal doctrine followed by the investigating judge Juan Guzman, that "disappearances" are not covered by Chile's amnesty law. It thus opens the way for additional prosecutions of military personnel responsible for crimes against humanity.
Chile's governmental institutions proved their democratic maturity during Pinochet's prosecution. Notably, of the Supreme Court's twenty members, only three were appointed by Pinochet. President Ricardo Lagos resisted calls from the right and pressure from the military to intervene in the trial, which he insisted was solely a matter for the courts. Moreover, the Council for the Defense of the State, an autonomous body which represents the interests of the Chilean State, made itself a party to the prosecution and actively intervened in the case against Pinochet.
Judge Juan Guzman will now take over the reins of the criminal investigation and is expected to order that Pinochet be subjected to medical tests to assess whether his mental condition allows him to stand trial. "This issue must be resolved transparently, fairly, and with full rights of appeal on both sides," said Vivanco. "If that is done and seen to be done no one should object to the outcome, since due process is a fundamental concern of the human rights movement."
