On April 22

On this day in ...
... 1959 (50 years ago today), Margot Fonteyn (left) arrived at an airport in New York after the diva ballerina had endured a 24-hour detention in Panama City, where authorities were looking for her husband, whom they suspected was planning a coup against the government. Fonteyn, who'd been born Margaret "Peggy" Hookham 40 years earlier in Surrey, England, told reporters she did not know the whereabouts of her husband, Dr. Roberto Arias, formerly Panama's ambassador to Britain. Within days his compatriots indeed would stage a failed coup. And in 1999 his aunt, Mireya Moscoso de Arias, would become Panama's 1st woman President.
... 1997, a 4-month siege by the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru ended when troops stormed the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, Peru, and freed 71 hostages. A Supreme Court judge was the only hostage killed, in addition to all 14 hostage-takers and 2 soldiers. Subsequent inquiry revealed that a number of rebels had been executed after surrendering in building at right. That revelation led to criminal charges against the intelligence chief of the man then Peru's President -- Alberto Fujimori, himself, as we've posted, convicted of crimes just this month.

(Prior April 22 posts are here and here.)

News Flash: Fujimori sentenced to 25 years

Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori was convicted today of human rights violations and sentenced to 25 years in prison. The judgment by the 3-judge panel is a historical first: never before has a Latin American court found its country's democratically elected president guilty of rights abuses. Fujimori was specifically found guilty of "ordering a military death squad to carry out two massacres that killed 25 people during his 1990-2000 rule." Overall, close to 70,000 people died during two decades of conflict.
(Prior IntLawGrrls posts here, here, and here.)

FujimoriWatch in Peru

A year and a half ago we posted on Chile's extradition of Peru's former President, Alberto Fujimori (left), into "the hands of justice" in the country he once governed. Now his trial on charges related to massacres in 1991 and 1992 is nearly over, and the country awaits the verdict.

Today's edition of the Lima daily La República reports:

Last Thursday thousands took to the streets to express their confidence in the Peruvian justice system. The prosecutor has asked for 30 years in prison for Alberto Fujimori. The day of sentencing is near. The majority do not want impunity.

Stay tuned.

Really big news about global justice

The last few weeks seem to indicate that international courts are getting some teeth, or, at least, are teething ...
► First, the International Criminal Court’s Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, gets Belgium to arrest Jean-Pierre Bemba, the loser in the 2006 presidential election in the Democratic Republic of Congo and head of one of the more infamous militias in that country. Perhaps to avoid charges of political meddling in DRC politics, Bemba has been charged at the ICC (left) not with crimes at home, but with involvement in mass rapes in the next-door Central African Republic.
► Then the ICC Prosecutor really gets serious, issuing an indictment for the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir. (IntLawGrrls posts below, here, here, and here.) That should take some of the wind out of the sails of those ICC skeptics who pointedly asked why, after a nearly 3-year investigation, the ICC had managed only the indictments of a mid-level militia commander and a single Sudanese minister. They asked: Was the Prosecutor focusing just on non-state actors rather than powerful state figures? The Al-Bashir indictment is Moreno-Ocampo’s answer. But it leads to another question: Will the U.N. Security Council use the leverage Moreno-Ocampo has given it to push for real concessions from the Sudanese government, or will it squander the chance?
► Finally, Radovan Karadžić has come in from the cold; he's due to appear in court at The Hague today. (Prior IntLawGrrls post here.) The onetime self-proclaimed president of the Bosnian Serb Republic was arrested by his erstwhile Serbian ex-backers. They are now apparently more interested in securing for Serbia a place in the European Union than in thumbing their nose at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (right).
So far, so good. But it is still true that prosecutions by international courts of high-ranking military and government officials remain few and far between.
The really interesting story is the rise in national-level prosecutions of such officials:
► In the same few weeks, Alberto Fujimori (on whose extradition IntLawGrrls posted here) continued to stand trial in Peru, with military officers confirming that the former president indeed knew of the killings carried out in the name of combating subversion. Fujimori, like Slobodan Milosevic, had delayed the proceedings due to ill-health, but trial is now scheduled to be completed by the fall.
► Then, Argentine courts convicted the Butcher of Córdoba, Benjamín Meléndez, of orchestrating killings and secret death camps during the 1976-83 dictatorship. Since the country’s Supreme Court annulled prior amnesty laws, courts have convicted a number of the top military and police officials, and even a military priest accused of abetting torture. Trials continue throughout the country.
► Next door in Chile, the head of the secret police and his henchmen were convicted of blowing up General Carlos Prats, the former army head, and his wife, in a 1974 bombing in Buenos Aires. And that’s just on one continent. (credit for Chilean Supreme Court photo below left)
Indeed, according to a soon-to-be-published book on trying heads of state, edited by Ellen Lutz and Caitlin Reiger, since 1990, no fewer than 57 heads of state from around the globe have been indicted, at a minimum, for misconduct while in office. True, about half these are corruption cases, not violations of human rights or humanitarian law. True as well, in far fewer cases do the indictments turn into trials and convictions, and fewer still result in actual prison stints. Nonetheless, there is clearly a trend, and it points to the diffuse – but key – influence of the new architecture of international justice on national judges and courts.
That’s the really big news.

In the hands of justice

Alberto Fujimori's "in the hands of justice," proclaims today's special edition of the Lima daily La República. Peru's former President arrived on an overnight flight, having been transported from Chile less than a day after a 5-judge chamber of Chile's Corte Suprema ruled that there is sufficient evidence of crime in 7 of the dozen events for which Peru had sought the Fujimori's extradition. In so doing, it overruled another Supreme Court judge's July ruling in favor of Fujimori, and credited instead the June recommendation in favor of extradition by Mónica Maldonado (left), the court's prosecutor. Among the cases now cleared for trial in Peru, the Santiago Times reported,

are two emblematic human rights abuse cases – the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres – which took place in 1991 and 1992 respectively. Twenty-five people, including a small child and a professor, were murdered in the two massacres. The killings are believed to have been carried out by an infamous, government-backed death squad known as the Colina Group. Prosecutors contend that Fujimori had direct knowledge of and may have even ordered the Group’s anti-subversion operations.

"From an international law standpoint," Helena Marambio of Amnesty International Chile said, the court found Fujimori "to be responsible for the character of his time in office. Let’s hope they continue to process him in Peru."
Meanwhile, Peru's Minister of Justice María Zavala (left) insisted at a press conference in Lima that the judges who will try the former President "must not be politicized."