When Spain's most famous judge, Baltasar Garzon, decided in 2008 to investigate the crimes of General Francisco Franco's 1939-75 dictatorship, he broke a taboo. Spain had never conducted a legal investigation of the Franco regime, which Garzon holds responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 alleged opponents during the 1936-39 civil war and the ensuing dictatorship.
A few months later, however, Garzon bowed to pressure from some legal experts and conservative politicians to drop the probe. Now he could face his own trial for his aborted investigation. The controversial legal case against Spain's "super judge" could spell the end of his career, and has sparked an international campaign against what Garzon's supporters regard as a political witch-hunt.
The 54-year-old National Court judge is best known for his investigations into alleged human rights abuses in Latin America, which are seen as having broken new judicial ground.
Garzon first soared to international notoriety with his failed attempt to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet from London in 1998. He has launched a string of human rights probes since then, ranging from the Western Sahara to the US prison camp in Guantanamo, Cuba. He even indicted Osama bin Laden over the September 2001 attacks in the United States.
Yet, when Garzon tried to tackle human rights abuses in Spain itself, he met with vehement opposition. The Spanish Civil War was waged by Franco's right-wing nationalists against the leftist republican government, leading to the dictatorship, which lasted until Franco's death in 1975. The fate of tens of thousands of Franco's victims was never clarified, Garzon said. To remedy that, he launched an inquiry into the disappearances and ordered the opening of some of the mass graves scattered around the country. Prosecutors accused the judge of overstepping his authority, forcing him to drop the probe and to transfer it to regional courts.
Legal complaints filed by several far-right groups - including Franco's Falangist party - have now dealt a new blow to Garzon as the Supreme Court is considering putting him on trial. In probing Franco's crimes, investigating magistrate Luciano Varela argues, Garzon ignored the amnesty granted to the late dictator's collaborators in 1977, as well as a 2007 law that pledged support to associations opening mass graves.
Garzon also faces eventual corruption charges for accepting sponsorship money from Santander bank for organising university courses in New York, and is being accused of slowness in dealing with the case of an alleged police tip-off about an upcoming raid to the militant Basque separatist group ETA.
The judges' organ CGPJ is considering suspending Garzon temporarily from office. If the Supreme Court finds him guilty of misconduct, he could be barred from exercising his profession for up to 20 years. There was "solid evidence" against the judge, the conservative daily El Mundo has stated, arguing that Garzon was no longer "respectable" enough to stay at the National Court.
The opposition conservative People's Party (PP), which still has a former Francoist minister in its ranks, has accused Garzon of "reopening old wounds." The judge's detractors also slam him as an excessively ambitious figure seeking out high-profile cases. Several prestigious international lawyers, however, have joined Spanish left-wing intellectuals, lawyers, politicians and human rights activists in their defence of Garzon.
Unlike Germany, Chile or Argentina, Spain has not taken legal action against its former dictatorial regime, and many people who profited from Francoism do not want that ever to happen, the judge's supporters argue. Many within the PP would also undoubtedly like to see the fall of the judge who contributed to revelations about a vast corruption network within that party recently, the left-leaning daily El Pais said.
The case against Garzon "gives the impression that Spain is trying to hide the existence of crimes against humanity,"Argentine Supreme Court judge Eugenio Raul Zaffaroni said, while Portuguese Nobel literature laureate Jose Saramago praised Garzon's "courage and honesty."
There is little doubt about the politicisation of the judiciary in Spain, where judges close to the governing Socialists or the opposition Conservatives often wrestle for the control of top courts. Even Garzon himself has been accused of acting out of political motives after a brief stint with socialist politics in the early 1990s. The current judicial offensive is not the first attack against the judge, who has even faced murder attempts by ETA. The legal proceedings against Garzon, however, could have long- term consequences in undermining the credibility of the Spanish judiciary, Supreme Court judge Juan Antonio Martin Pallin warned. dpa st ncs.
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