MADRID (Reuters) – Spanish intellectuals and trade unionists yesterday protested against the indictment of a judge who launched an inquiry into some 100,000 killings committed during Spain’s Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
Judge Baltasar Garzon, who won fame for his attempt to bring the late former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to justice, is accused of abusing his judicial powers when he opened the inquiry into alleged human rights abuses by Franco’s forces.
He is expected to be suspended from acting as a judge pending the trial after a Supreme Court judge ruled earlier this month there was a case to answer.
Irish historian Ian Gibson was among about 1,000 people who gathered at the Complutense University in Madrid to protest the pending trial.
“In this country a genocide was committed,” he said. “I’m not just talking about the war but about after the war…And the State has not investigated that. That seems terrible because the country can’t move forward if it doesn’t confront its past.”
Relatives of “the disappeared” during Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s also joined tributes to the judge who used Spain’s universal jurisdiction law to open cases investigating human rights abuses across the world.
