The Rise and Fall of Baltasar Garzón
Baltasar Garzón, a high-profile Spanish judge who rose to fame for using the legal doctrine of universal jurisdiction to indict former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, has been disbarred for ordering illegal wiretaps.
The Spanish Supreme Court on February 9 unanimously ruled that Garzón acted illegally when he authorized police to record jailhouse conversations between detainees and their defense lawyers in a political corruption investigation known in Spain as the Gürtel case.
In a 70-page ruling, the court said Garzón’s actions “caused a drastic and unjustified reduction of the right to a defense” and that his tactics “these days are only found in totalitarian regimes.” It barred him from practicing law for the next 11 years. Although prosecutors had originally demanded a 17-year ban, the court’s ruling cannot be appealed and thus effectively ends the judicial career of Garzón, who is 56.
Garzón’s conviction has implications that reach far beyond Spain. Not only does it deprive the global Left of one of its most ambitious legal activists. It also marks the beginning of the end of Spain’s foray into cross-border jurisprudence, which many have described as the politically motivated harassment of select right-leaning foreign leaders, particularly those in Israel and the United States.
Garzón’s legal problems began in October 2008, when Garzón accused the late General Francisco Franco and 34 of his former generals and ministers of crimes against humanity in connection with mass executions and tens of thousands of disappearances of civilians between 1936 and 1952. Garzón also ordered the exhumation of 19 mass graves.
Considering that the Spanish Civil War ended more than 70 years ago, and that Franco died in 1975, few suspects, even if identified, would be alive today to stand trial. But the main objection to Garzón’s probe stemmed from the fact that he decided to limit his investigation only to crimes committed by the right-wing Nationalists (i.e., the Francoists). Garzón’s inquiry did not extend to political crimes committed by the left-wing Republicans (anti-Francoists), which included Marxists, liberals, and anarchists. Republican death squads murdered up to 70,000 clergy, nuns, and ordinary middle class Spaniards in a reign of terror that largely contributed to the rise of Franco.
Garzón’s supporters say Spain needs an honest accounting of its troubled past and they view his probe as a long-overdue indictment, even if only a symbolic one, of the Franco regime. But the one-sided nature of Garzón’s probe sparked outrage among Spanish conservatives. They accused the judge (who in 1993 took a leave of absence to run for a seat in Spanish parliament as a member of the Socialist party, but returned to the bench in anger only a year later after he was passed over for Justice minister) of political grandstanding and pursuing a personal vendetta against them.
After several conservative groups filed complaints against Garzón for not applying the law equally, the Supreme Court appointed Judge Luciano Varela to examine the case. In a 14-page ruling, Varela concluded that Garzón had manipulated the course of justice by knowingly violating a 1977 amnesty law that shields all sides, including members of the Franco dictatorship, from legal persecution. Moreover, a 2007 Law of Historical Memory explicitly gave the lower courts (and not Garzón’s high court) jurisdiction over locating and digging up the mass graves that still dot the Spanish countryside.
Varela charged that Garzón, in order to get around these restrictions, tried to create law rather than administer it. “Aware of his lack of jurisdiction and that the crimes reported lacked penal relevance when the proceedings began, [Garzón] built a contrived argument to justify his control of the proceedings he initiated,” Varela wrote in his ruling.
Garzón denied any wrongdoing and defended his probe as legitimate. But even some of his admirers say vanity is the fatal weakness of an ambitious man. Many observers believe that Garzón had come to view himself as an “exceptional” judge, not bound to the laws and constitution of Spain, as are other judges. His arrogance, they say, made him become increasingly prone to overreaching his authority.
Garzón jumped to international fame as a leading proponent of Spain’s doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which holds that crimes like torture or terrorism can be tried in Spain even if they are alleged to have been committed elsewhere and have no link to Spain.
In 1998, Garzón had former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet arrested during a visit to London, although Britain ultimately refused to extradite him to Madrid for trial. In the years that followed, Garzón used the principle of universal jurisdiction to go after current or former government officials such as former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and around 100 leaders of the 1976-1983 military junta in Argentina.
At one point, Garzón and his colleagues were pursuing more than a dozen international investigations into alleged cases of torture, genocide, and crimes against humanity in places as far-flung as Colombia, Tibet, and Rwanda. Most of these cases had had little or no connection to Spain and critics accused Garzón of interpreting the concept of universal jurisdiction too loosely.
Calls to rein in the judges increased when Spanish magistrates announced probes involving Israel and the United States. In January 2009, Spanish National Court Judge Fernando Andreu said he would investigate seven current or former Israeli officials over a 2002 air attack in Gaza. In March of that year, Garzón said he would investigate six Bush administration officials for giving legal cover to torture at the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. That May, another Spanish high-court judge, Santiago Pedraz, said he would charge three U.S. soldiers with crimes against humanity for the April 2003 deaths of a Spanish television cameraman and a Ukrainian journalist. The men were killed when a U.S. tank crew shelled their Baghdad hotel.
In any case, Garzón and his colleagues have been highly selective about the cases they pursue. For example, they have never attempted to prosecute any Palestinian terrorists for war crimes. Nor have they had much zeal for investigating crimes against humanity in Chechnya or Darfur. Nor have they prosecuted any of the suspected Nazi war criminals who sought refuge in Spain after the end of World War II.
In 2009, Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido asked Garzón to shelve his case against the Americans and warned of the risks of turning the Spanish justice system into a “plaything” for politically motivated prosecutions. Rather than heeding that advice, Garzón redoubled his efforts to pursue U.S. officials suspected of authorizing and carrying out the alleged torture of four inmates at Guantánamo Bay.
Concerned that Spain’s judicial system was being hijacked by left-wing groups out to pursue political vendettas (and that Spain’s media savvy judges were more interested in scoring political points than in upholding the law), the Spanish parliament in 2009 passed a bill to narrow the scope of the universal jurisdiction law to cases in which the victims of a crime include Spaniards or the alleged perpetrators were in Spain.
But old habits die hard. In January 2012, Garzón’s successor, Judge Pablo Rafael Ruz Gutiérrez, reactivated the investigation into the alleged torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. In a 19-page ruling, Ruz said he would seek additional information in the case of the four Guantánamo captives, who have since been released, but who allege they were humiliated and subjected to torture while in U.S. custody.
Because the United States has not pursued the matter, Ruz said, his court has jurisdiction to investigate the former U.S. officials named in the former detainees’ complaint. Those officials include former President George W. Bush; former Vice President Dick Cheney; former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; and two former Guantánamo commanders, retired Marine Major General Michael Lehnert and retired Army Major General Geoffrey Miller.
Garzón’s friends on the left, both inside Spain and abroad, have expressed outrage that the “crusading human rights judge” was hoist with his own petard. In a rather hysterical editorial, the New York Times, for example, described the Spanish high court ruling as an “appalling attack on judicial independence.”
Not everyone agrees. Spanish Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón said the ruling demonstrated “the normal functioning of our institutions.” Esperanza Aguirre, the head of Madrid’s center-right regional government, said “it is a happy day for the rule of law.”
Henry Kissinger once warned that “universal jurisdiction risks creating universal tyranny–that of judges.” In Spain, the judges, led by Garzón, have been responsible for their own undoing.
Garzon’s legal problems are not limited to Spain, it seems they have swum from the European shore of the Atlantic to the other: _All_ ecuatorian lawyers professional associations accuse Garzon of misappropiation of public funds.
http://www.typicallyspanish.com/news/publish/article_33741.shtml
First: Garzon has been suspended for eleven years because he spied the conversation between the accused and his lawyer. He got through for cheap: Spanishj law states a minimum sentence of ten years supension but it couild heva been a life time suspension and a jail sentence.
Second: It was an unanimous decision. In fact the vocal was a left wing of judge.
Third: Garzon has been found guilty of requiring money of companies with opened cases in exchange of filing them. He escaped sentence beacuuse of prescription. The plaint took place twenty days too late.
Fourth: Garzon made no mass grave opened. Here is a link in Spanish about the whole thing. http://www.abc.es/20100522/opinion-tercera/garzon-nunca-investigo-crimenes-20100522.html. I will summarize briefly: there was a demand for an investigation in order to find the graces of people who had disappeared during the Spanish Civil War. It was qualified as abductions. Garzon did nothhing about it between othere reasons because he was not competent for such cases: he was judge of instruction for cases of terrorism and attempts to overthrow thengovernment. Then suddenly he decided the nationalist raise in 1936 was an attempt agaisnt the government sio he was competent and he indicted theirty odd people, one of them Franco. BTW Franco would have been about 110 years ols and all the people on his list had been dead for decades. He asked for Franco’s death certificate After a month he closed the case saying all indicted people were dead and anyway he declares himself incompetent about the case. But in the whole thing there were investigations, zero mass graves opneed, zero everything. It was ever a PR operation for Garzon. At tax payer’s expense.
5) There was an amanesty law covering what happened during the Civil War on both sides and that means Garzon was violating the law. Sevarl years before there was aplaint against Santiago Carrillo former head of Spain’s Communist Party and author of the massacres of Paracuellos aka Spain’s Katyn (six thousand dead). In that case Garzon filed the case after invvoking the law of amnesty.
hi,
The spanish people are more worried about jobs and money nowadays
LOL!! Hubris meet Nemesis. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Don’t worry, I’m sure Garzón will get a nice job at the United Nations. It’s what they do best, hire far-left idiots like this.
Sir, you are joking but could be right. The UN has already asked the law of amnesty declared void. The same one that allowed Santiago Carrillo to escape prosecution for Paracuellos and Torrejon, supposedly the victim got reparations and that was enough. Unlike Franco he is a communist,to be fair, he began eurocommunism along Berlinguer, who broke ties with the Soviet Union , and unlike Franco is still alive.
He also dismissed prosecution of Castro
The judiciary branches of the world are de facto communist enclaves.
The whole business of international jurisdiction creates
results that are
endlessly complicated and bizarre – and often unjust, by
most people’s moral compass.
The famous case about Pinochet, whom the judge wanted
extradited to Spain for crimes against Spanish citizens
in Chile is a case in point. Spanish (and any other,
except diplomats) citizens in Chile are subject to
Chilean law, whether as perps or as victims, NOT their
“home” jurisdiction.
Claiming anything else produces bizarre results. Take an example:
A young woman living in the US but is a recent immigrant and a
citizen of Iran. She has an affair with a local boy (let’s
assume for simplicity that they are both over 18).
Lets assume that prior to the affair she was a virgin.
Now the local boy visits Germany, which is famous (and infamous) for
respecting extradition treaties. Now, Germany has such a treaty with
Iran. (Or at least it did at one time.)
So the Iranians ask the Germans to arrest him and extradite him to Iran,
since seduction of a virgin is a serious crime under Iranian law.
Now, does this make sense? Well if you don’t think so, have another think
about international jurisdiction.
There is an public order exception and some rules on extradition. For example Venezuela has never, even during dictatorship, extradited people to countries with death penalty of jail time over 30 years, unless the country( the USA has done it many times compromise not to apply that penalty)
How sweet. Spain is about to release a reincident and unrepentent child raper. he was allowedf a leave during a previous jail sentence and he raped and killed in so gruesome way the guardiaciviles were sick. But Spain is a humanitarian country: no sentence can exceed 20 years. Too bad for little girls: there iis no death penalty for criminals (not even lfe sentences) but thre is one for them
Activist Judges in the USA, beware. This will be your fate the day Obama is tossed from office. It might be much worse too. How does rotting in prison sound?
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Adios, Baltazar. It’s a dark day for his pals in Al Qaida, and the communist parties of the world.
It’s good that this judge is gone, but how many more like him infest courtrooms the world over?
Selective indeed: Fidel Castro was a frequent visitor to Spain and was never touched.
Speaking of Garzon’s most celebrated case, the Pinochet affair: How many knew that Pinochet did not engineer a “coup,” but acted at the behest of Chile’s national assembly? A majority of the deputies, like at least a plurality of the Chilean public, were very alarmed at what Allende was doing. This was much the same scenario as what happened in Honduras a couple of years ago. remember that debacle? Obama, Hillary and the MSM insisted on calling that a coup as well.
Even Wikipedia won’t tell you that Pinochet was acting at the behest of a majority of elected Chilean officials. I didn’t find out unitl rather recently. It was easy to be ignorant: the world outside of Chile simply didn’t report that fact.
We aren’t at all surprised to heard about judge Garzón’s dismissal from the bench. We were always critical of his overzealous attitude and rather biased application of justice. His personal vendetta against General Pinochet of Chile is a case in point. Pinochet saved his country from falling into the communists camp, and besides he brought the ailing Chile’s economy into the twenty century. Generalísimo Francisco Franco of Spain stopped point blank the communist take over of Spain, and paved the ground for it’s economic recovery.
Garzón was a good man, however, he tried too hard in order to emulate the “illustrious Manchego”, bent into repairing the wrong doing all over the world, a sort of mental aberration known as: the delusional thinking of the “social reivindicator” A diagnosis that might also be applied collectively to the populists, leftist and multiculturalist from all over the world.