The Plural interview the researcher who inspired Garzón's complaint about the lost children of Franco
"We have to remind some that the democratic right also defended the Republic and suffered reprisals "
Marisu
MORENO
Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Arias is a researcher at the Institute of European and International Criminal Law at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, where she teaches international criminal law. It is one of the experts consulted by the judge Baltasar Garzon in his attempt to process the Franco regime. His latest research contained in the book "The Case of Lost Children of Franco, a crime against humanity", published in October 2008 by Editorial Tirant Lo Blanch, "was cited specifically in the Auto Garzón which inhibits for territorial courts. The judge of the High Court based this work the need to legally investigate the disappearances of children Republican prey during the dictatorship of Franco.
Who should do justice to the victims of the Franco regime: the historians, judges, or both? Both the guidelines
reparations to victims of gross violations of human rights of the United Nations General Assembly, as their struggle to impunity prepared by the Commission on Human Rights stressed the need to use different remedies that complement levels, the disappearance is a complex and serious violation of human rights and the duty to remember, historical memory, is only one of these elements, but does not preclude the right of victims to justice, or the right to the truth of the families, for the identification and whereabouts of their loved ones. In this sense, the only exclusion of approaches is that we have tried to do, and he continues to claim, by our authorities. Replace "everything" for one of its parts. But in terms of international crimes of state responsibility is to meet with all forms of redress and justice for the victims, and not only that may be preferred. We're talking about human rights rather than a la carte menu.
What role did the Church in the disappearance of children?
That remains to be clarified by the same "Official investigation" which is also pending in the case of the missing mass graves. According to paragraph 77 of the "Balance of crimes of the Franco dictatorship" of the Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe, and I read literally: "The Catholic Church in Spain, closely linked to the regime (...) also played an important role in providing the many prison staff, the most notorious women's prisons and reformatories for youth whose former detainees have publicly denounced the physical and psychological abuse suffered by the religious personnel. " Concerned in any case to determine what kind of assistance provided religious personnel of the detention of mothers and young children, speaking of mothers and children victims of illegal detentions by the state, concerned more so, given that the Franco regime wiped also an unknown number of children, without being clear on which facilities could be taken from their mothers or what kind of staff was in charge of them when this happened. It should be clarified which children and mothers passed through these centers and what happened inside them. This official investigation is essential and urgent.
Is this perhaps the lagging strand known of the Francoist repression is it comparable to the cases of missing children in Argentina?
Certainly in the case of Argentina, well known for vindicating the tireless work of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, some 800 children were stolen, and in the English case could be facing thousands of cases. As in Argentina is expected that the majority of all these lost children also still alive, but the Argentine government has been twenty years looking for those who can and has created several agencies to locate missing persons as a Search Committee and the Right to Identity and a National Genetic Data Base to cross free samples with reliability than 99%, however the English government has not yet begun to search for the missing Franco. And those who wanted to leave somewhere in their samples if they ever reach your loved one have had to pay out of pocket.
What have been the case that you have drawn more attention?
Both the cases of stolen children of imprisoned mothers, such as minor thefts or abductions maquis environments of children in the colonies of Victoria Kent children, sent by the Republic of France and other countries are equally inhuman me , I could not distinguish. I personally hear the testimony of Emily Girón whose son took "to baptize" nothing more to give birth and is not returned ... so very much pain of a mother who is still there after a whole life, day by day, waiting for the state, our social and democratic state of law, he returned to his son's testimony the brothers of the deceased who have a lifetime knowing that somewhere they have a brother but do not know where ... Emily was the sister of a notorious guerrilla and therefore had no right, not even the flesh of his flesh . Repugnant to think of those who committed such acts and who gave them coverage, with impunity, I come again to mind the verses of Otero's "If I opened my mouth to see the pure and terrible face of my country, if I opened my lips to desgarrármelos ... "more typical of the dictatorship. This research has been with me for three years has been tough and I can only have words of appreciation for people who have accompanied me and made it possible in all respects by the publishers beginning Tirant Lo Blanch gave me a place to call all this "crime against humanity" when they only spoke of "memory." But especially for people who are committed to defending our democracy threatened by having to pay this price as on catcher.
inhibition Garzón "in favor of the courts is territorial the attempt to process the Franco regime?
at all. One thing that governments and authorities have not understood the first time ever - in any country where they have carried out enforced disappearances of people do not speak only of Spain - is that families can not really do anything else to look for their loved ones because they are its greatest asset. Who among us could do nothing but seek with all their might, as in our own son, wife, brother, father, if tomorrow was taken without re-state agents to account for his whereabouts?, When would stop find us at our own loved ones say what he said Rouco or whoever?. In a field so slow evolution and formation as international law in recent decades the families of the disappeared, no matter what country, has been a driving force that has moved heaven and earth in all international bodies from humble places home, compared to state power and truly frightening situations, to save what is dear to them in life. It is something as human as love for their loved ones which move it all, his great pain, his despair at not being able to see them but wish with all my heart recovered in their life. Whoever speaks of revenge or vengeance completely unknown historical situation of these people and what drives them. For even limit this to the defenders of the Republic, is applicable to any family that may still be missing. Understand the truth of it all overwhelms the soul in a way hard to explain. Does not serve, nor will they serve, no license on paper, they want their loved ones or their remains to treat them with dignity and knowledge to cry, and in the case of lost children know they probably still alive and this is going to spur more. Any government that does not have this in mind, is wrong.
What about the role played by the prosecution in this whole affair?
Of the various legal issues costs work to understand, and not a few, which perhaps more my attention is being closed so as not qualifying "crime against humanity" to which legally gather, too well, all the requirements for it. If only one could identify any international treaty to assert the contrary, that introdujese some element of ambiguity, could be understood that one could opt for this lens. Not so. So anxious to avoid using the term "crime against humanity" recalls the strange commitment to other "taboo words" recently as "economic crisis". But this does not prevent us from having "crimes against humanity go unpunished, nor has it prevented the reality of the "crisis."
What do you think the Amnesty Law?
The amnesty law was a necessary element of the time, just as was also the international community needed some form of negotiation with Milosevic to pacify the situation in former Yugoslavia, which did not stop after a reasonable period of stabilization the situation was the same international community that sit at Milosevic and other officials in the dock of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Because crimes against humanity will never and can not prescribe be subject to amnesties and sooner or later comes to be accountable to justice. The Human Rights Committee just told to Spain just three weeks ago that the amnesty law can not be a law preventing an end to the fight against impunity, although the prosecutor of the Audiencia Nacional has not been given a deaf ear . Does
Remembrance Act has fallen short?
memory law violated all treaties and international human rights instruments on enforced disappearances, reparations to their victims and fight impunity. I can not express more clearly. Furthermore, Article 13 of the Act of memory is a "copy-paste" Franco model of the Order of May 1, 1940 "on exhumation and reburial of bodies killed by the Reds." But since since 1979 Spain has ratified the European Convention on Human Rights "copy-paste" in question violates Articles 2 and 13 of the same, in my last work published in Judges for Democracy pointed out some twenty European Court of Rights Human prove it. Along with this I do not know how to qualify the law of the case forget the memory of lost children, not even mentioned. Not even mentioned. Neither they nor their poor mothers dictatorship retaliation for the theft of their children. Neither gender is no remembrance of them.
How could combat impunity in this country seem to have the crimes of the Franco? Giving
normal application of international treaties and human rights. Not that do not exist, or that Spain has not ratified, or are unknown. Is that it is attempting to maintain a policy against odds which, without being understood very well why the PSOE persists longer stands alone in this. Until Izquierda Unida which initially negotiated to take forward the law is now talking about a law "of impunity", rather than a "law of memory." And there is still that, a couple of years away, may begin to reach the international resolutions. None of this is correct, and I have confidence in an early review, in depth, of the law "Memory" from our authorities.
Right refers to the crimes of the other side ... are they comparable?
same is what Franco did in decades to try to justify the unjustifiable, and I can not but regret that a certain portion of the right forget that the democratic right also defended the Republic and was in retaliation for the Franco regime. There are countless examples of remarkable people and deep Catholic beliefs and defended conservative ideas that was to defend the Republic the constitution and democratically elected. For me the general Vicente Rojo is the first example of them all. The "do not imitate" Indalecio Prieto - one of the most moving paragraphs to be read even decades later - it is there, the painstaking efforts Irujo or Azaña also, all top officials of the Republic, to reestablish the situation when state had to forego the only part of the forces of public order which still had to deal with the other party had turned against him, such examples make the light in his profound moral and human misery, the statements and public calls to genocide and rape of heads of the other side as Queipo de Llano or Mola. So legally they are not at all comparable, because of the absence of a planned design, pest control, from the upper echelons of power apparatus, or not, it follows that, with international law in hand, one can speak of crimes of the coup against humanity but not the Republic. I do not think that our democratic right to have no need to come to the defense of the Franco regime just as the German democratic right has no need to come to the defense of Nazism. _
0 comments:
Post a Comment