Torture

About: Torture is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 8173 publications have been published within this topic receiving 109895 citations.

The Pinochet Precedent and Universal Jurisdiction

Abstract: In October 1998, General Augusto Pinochet, military ruler of Chile from 1973 to 1990, was arrested in a London clinic on orders of a Spanish court. That court, acting under a Spanish law permitting universal jurisdiction over certain crimes, has since 1996 been investigating the top leadership of the Chilean and Argentine militaries for their role in the murder, disappearance and torture of thousands of real or perceived opponents throughout the Southern Cone of South America. Pinochet's detention merely exposed to the world the tip of a larger iceberg. The Pinochet case and the related cases in Spanish and other European courts provide a fascinating case study of the benefits and risks of universal jurisdiction. My talk today will focus on a few aspects of these cases: first, the jurisdictional bases of the Spanish and other European suits in national law, and the implications of this grounding in national law; second, the effects of the Spanish cases, in particular, within Chile and Argentina; and third, some of the particular factors that have made the Spanish prosecutions relatively successful. The Spanish cases began when members of the Spanish Union of Progressive Prosecutors filed a complaint in April 1996, accusing members of the Argentine military junta of genocide, terrorism, and other crimes regarding the detention and subsequent disappearance during the 1970s of a number of Spanish citizens and citizens of Spanish descent who were living in Argentina. The case was filed under Spanish laws allowing public interest organizations, as well as aggrieved individuals, to file and maintain criminal complaints even without the backing of, and in this case over the strenuous opposition of, the state prosecutors office. Thus, a group of exiles and human rights activists, backed by the Spanish political party United Left and by professional associations, could maintain the prosecution without state consent, merely with a commitment by the state not to interfere with the independence of its own judiciary. Article 23.4 of the Spanish Judicial Law allows prosecution of nonSpanish citizens for some crimes committed outside Spain, among them

Tracing collective memory: Chilean truth commissions and memorial sites:

Abstract: This article takes a closer look at the master narratives of the Chilean truth commissions and how these are contested and negotiated by social actors demanding truth and justice. Over time these actors have created new spaces for their narratives about the military dictatorship (1973–1990), broadening the perspectives on the past in the public space. The process of contestation and negotiation can be traced on the local level in the creation of a memorial site on the grounds of a former detention and torture centre, Villa Grimaldi, which led to fierce debates on what should be remembered, and how. Through the ongoing process of negotiation and contestation and social action the collective memory of the dictatorship in Chilean society has become ‘thicker’.

Coming to terms : South Africa's search for truth

Abstract: "Coming to Terms" is a groundbreaking consideration of a country's attempts to put a troubled history behind it and reach a new stage of development Martin Meredith takes an unprecedented look into the key cases presented to the commission - both those involving well-known figures such as Stephen Biko and Winnie Mandela, and those that deal with the routine violence and torture that shaped the lives of average South Africans In vivid narrative and dramatic testimony he brings to life many stories of individuals - heroes, villains, and those who fell uneasily into the grey area in between - as well as the larger story of a country attempting to move beyond a legacy of violence Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tina Rosenberg then takes a more global look at how nations must deal with a repressive past, drawing on her own conversations with victims and victimizers in more than a decade of reporting from Latin America, Eastern Europe, South Africa and Bosnia She evaluates the strategies different countries have tried in the name of truth and justice, and looks at controversial international developments that open exciting new possibilities for countries wishing to hold past dictators accountable for their crimes The only book to offer a complete and even-handed account of the work and the moral issues raised by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, "Coming to Terms" is useful reading for anyone interested in South Africa, human rights, or the evolution of democracy

Returning to the Site of Horror On the Reclaiming of Clandestine Concentration Camps in Argentina

Abstract: Further to the recent handover of the Naval School of Mechanics (ESMA), Argentina’s most notorious centre for the clandestine torture and assassination of leftist militants under the dictatorship of 1976–83, to the city of Buenos Aires, in order to create on the premises a ‘Space for Memory’, debates on the proper commemoration of the recent past have gained momentum. In the course of these, it has become clear that there is currently no consensus among the human rights organizations, let alone Argentine society at large, on how the former sites of state terrorism can be adequately ‘recovered’, or what the purpose and function of such a recovery might be. Rather than as a shortcoming, however, this impossibility of closure, and of the monumentalization of a social consensus about the past in museal forms, might be taken as an opportunity to problematize some of the politics and material poetics underpinning the contemporary ‘memorial museum’. The article therefore analyses the principal arguments and posi...