17/05/2014 – MADRID, Spain (DPA).- Baltasar Garzón knows Universal Justice well: The arrest order for Augusto Pinochet was based on it. 1998 in London.
More of 15 years after that milestone, The former Spanish judge sponsors a congress in Madrid on a principle that Mariano Rajoy's government recently turned into a dead letter.
Bajo el título "Jurisdicción Universal en el siglo XXI", The former magistrate of the Spanish National Court brings together fifty experts from 15 nationalities that will defend that victims are universal and deserve justice.
The organizer of the event is the Baltasar Garzón International Foundation (FIGBAR), that the judge created after the Spanish Supreme Court disqualified him in 2012 during 11 years.
La Justicia Universal es "un principio cuestionado por el poder político, desconocido por el poder económico y rechazado por razones diplomáticas", Garzón's foundation points out.
Among the experts who will meet in Madrid in round tables and conferences are the only living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trial, Benjamin B. Ferencz, and Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi.
The Argentine Luis Moreno Ocampo also attends, former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (CPI); Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami, vice president of the Garzón foundation, as well as judges, lawyers and prosecutors who participated in judicial prosecutions for crimes against humanity in Spain and Latin America.
It is an exercise of pressure on the Executive of a country that, after the step taken by Garzón de 1998 became a world reference in the persecution of genocides, war criminals and torturers who were not prosecuted by their home nations, but now his hands are tied to continue.
Se celebra "para reflexionar sobre la situación actual en España y en el mundo y hacer lo que el Partido Popular y el gobierno español no hicieron antes de proferir la reforma de esa ley", Garzón said this week.
"Podemos cambiar el curso de los acontecimientos y la razón está de nuestra parte", says the former judge. The PP imposed an express reform in the Spanish Parliament after a diplomatic crisis opened with China due to the investigation by the National Court against former president Jiang Zemin and four other former high officials of the communist regime for genocide in Tibet in the years 80 and 90.
Its entry into force, he 14 March, It represents de facto the end of the dozen cases open in the court, like the death of the Spanish cameraman José Couso in Iraq at the hands of the US Army, the CIA flights or the murder of Jesuits in El Salvador in 1989.
