Baltasar Garzon, Spanish Judge Responsible for Exhumation of Lorca and Many Others Citizens' Corpses, On Trial

The New Yorker's Book Bench examines the situation of Baltasar Garzon, the judge given the Human Rights Activism award last month and currently suspended from his job for, well, here you go:

Garzón is widely known for his pursuit of international human-rights pariahs like Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, but Garzón himself is now on trial in a case that stems from Spain’s own troubled history. In 2008, Garzón issued a judicial edict accusing General Francisco Franco and thirty-four accomplices of the disappearance and systematic killing of more than a hundred and fourteen thousand people during the Spanish Civil War and in the decade that followed. Many of the victims were buried in fosa comunes, or mass graves. As part of the ruling, Garzón ordered the exhumation of nineteen graves, including one believed to contain the remains of the poet Federico García Lorca.

A week after Garzón issued his order, Spain’s chief prosecutor, Javier Zaragoza, challenged it, partly on the grounds that it violated a series of amnesty laws passed in the late nineteen-seventies as part of the process of restoring democracy to Spain. This agreement to not examine the past later became known as the pacto del olvido (pact of forgetting). In November, 2008, the country’s highest court of appeals ruled 14-3 against Garzón. The matter appeared to be settled, but two months later a far-right organization filed a criminal suit against Garzón, accusing him of “judicial prevarication,” knowingly overstepping his authority, and violating the pacto del olvido. Garzón’s defense is that crimes against humanity cannot be absolved by a self-given, retroactive immunity. Garzón is now on trial in the Spanish Supreme Court. He faces disbarment for twenty years if convicted.

Further insight into Garzon's upbringing and political and judicial outlooks can be found here.

Jon Lee Anderson's article on the dispute over Lorca's grave, linked within the above, can be found here.