Word: courtelis
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...Loreto. France prosecuted its Vichy collaborators in a series of contentious trials that stretched into the 1990s. On Oct. 16, it was finally Spain's turn. Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died 33 years ago, but it was only this week that Judge Baltasar Garzón of the National Court declared him and his cronies guilty of crimes against humanity and authorized a long-awaited investigation into their misdeeds...
...Following Franco's death in 1975, Spaniards tacitly agreed to a 'Pact of Silence' that covered over the wounds of the 1936-39 civil war and the following dictatorship, and even granted amnesty to those who carried out the Francoist repression. With his ruling, which authorizes the National Court to investigate the disappearance and assassination of some 114,000 victims of the regime between the years 1936 and 1952, Garzón has brought that silence officially...
...that law doesn't go far enough. "The political branch of the government is still refusing to publicly recognize the victims of the repression," he says. "And still refusing to punish the perpetrators. If the law had been better, we wouldn't have had to go to court...
...country where some members of Franco's regime continued to hold office long after the dictatorship ended, not everyone supports the decision - including the court's lead prosecutor, who is appealing the ruling. Senator Agustín Conde, spokesperson on judicial affairs for the opposition Popular Party, lamented that Garzón was "reopening wounds that were happily healed," and an editorial in the center-right paper El Mundo warned that "the politics of memory are nasty" and constitute a "bloodless form of vengeance...
...authorities in July promising to deliver Petrella once her French administrative appeals had been exhausted, Sarkozy urged clemency in light of the prisoner's perilous health - a suggestion swiftly rebuffed by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Rome. Less than a month later, a French appeals court ordered Petrella's release from custody at the request of French justice officials who fear she'd die otherwise - resulting in her police guards halting their surveillance of her hospitalization in the intensive care unit where she remains bed-ridden. Because of that, many interested observers resentfully anticipated Sarkozy...