Word: pinochets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Since leaving power, Gen. Pinochet has successfully assured himself immunity from prosecution, first claiming that, as a former head of state, he could not be prosecuted for acts carried out in performing the functions of office. That defense ran out of steam in 1998, thrown out by the House of Lords (the United Kingdom’s highest court of appeal), which ruled rightly that murder, torture and hostage-taking fail to qualify as legitimate functions of a head of state and so are not immune from prosecution. Gen. Pinochet then turned to his poor health as a defense...
While the Chilean military welcomed its former leader home in 2000 with a full-dress greeting party, others were not so warm to his return, and efforts to try Pinochet domestically for his alleged abuses began almost immediately. Ever since, the General’s manifold layers of protection have been slowly stripped away. First to go was his senatorial immunity: in August 2000, Chile’s Supreme Court stripped Gen. Pinochet of the protection he enjoyed as a Senator-for-life. There remained, however, the pesky issue of Pinochet’s health: after a judge placed...
There’s just one small problem: Gen. Pinochet might actually be medically unfit to stand trial. The former president, who suffers from diabetes and arthritis and who has been diagnosed with “moderate dementia,” took ill on Saturday after reportedly suffering a stroke. Leonel Gomez, director of the Santiago army hospital where Pinochet is being treated, has said that the General is recovering and could be released in the next few days, and a statement issued by the hospital says that he has recovered consciousness and mobility and is no longer in critical...
...rights violators trample on rights themselves. Though Judge Guzman may have been convinced by Pinochet’s lucidity during trial that the General was not as mad as his lawyers claimed he was, yesterday’s Court of Appeals ruling came barely a day after news that Pinochet was even recovering from his illness, and there is little evidence that the court could have known for certain Pinochet’s present capacity for standing trial, in light of his hospitalization. The decision seems disturbingly premature given the unexpected alteration of the very circumstances that prompted...
...Augusto Pinochet is brought to trial, as believers in human rights must hope that he ultimately is, it is imperative that his trial happens in an atmosphere ripe with fairness and justice, the very things that were denied to Chileans during the General’s rule. As Professor Jacqueline Bhabha, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard and executive director of the University Committee on Human Rights Studies, wrote in an e-mail: “Process is critically important to human rights, and while impunity is fundamentally undermining so is revenge. If someone is too demented...