Uruguay Supreme Court annuls amnesty law, as accountability continues in Latin America

The Uruguayan Supreme Court made Uruguay the second country in Latin America – after Argentina – to formally annul the amnesty law passed to protect members of the security forces from accusations that they committed torture, disappearance and summary execution during the period of military control (1973-85).
The action taken on Monday by Uruguay's highest court (photo credit) came as the legislature was considering a bill to do the same thing.
Last year, the same court had struck down much of the 1986 amnesty law – Ley de Caducidad de la Pretensión Punitiva del Estado – in a single case involving the 1974 killing of Nibia Sabalsagaray (below left), a literature professor. The current ruling made that decision applicable in all cases. The court’s decision in the earlier case held that Articles 1, 3 and 4 of the amnesty law was unconstitutional because it:
► Violated the separation of powers;
► Did not constitute a valid amnesty; and
► Violated Uruguay’s human rights commitments.
These articles suspended criminal prosecution (Article 1), and gave the executive branch the power to decide whether a particular crime or episode fell within the scope of the amnesty (Articles 3 and 4), thus violating principles of separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary.
In addition, the unanimous decision found that the law interfered with the rights of victims to truth and to judicial process. The court cited the role of international law in Uruguay’s legal system and precedents from neighboring Argentina, as well as the inter-American human rights system’s Commission and Court, in reaching its decision.
What makes the Uruguayan decision particularly interesting is that the Uruguayan public has –twice – rejected a call to overturn the amnesty law via plebiscite.
Uruguayan law allows laws to be overturned if a large number of people call for a plebiscite. Although civil society groups in 2009 managed to gain the required number of signatures to put the issue on the ballot, it lost narrowly. Thus, the Court was acting to uphold legal principles, even in the face of contrary public opinion.
It is unclear how many additional cases will result, since less than 200 forced disappearances or killings took place in Uruguay; most Uruguayans suspected of leftist activity were killed or disappeared in neighboring Argentina. If the courts start taking up torture cases, that will change, since a large number of Uruguayans were tortured during the years of military control. Some of the top leaders of that period, including former presidents Juan Bordaberry and Gregorio Alvarez (right), are already in prison based on earlier cases found not to come within the ambit of the amnesty law. (photo credit)
The court’s decision brings Uruguay into line with its neighbors.
Argentina annulled its amnesty law in 2005, and trials are under way regarding events in the most notorious secret detention centers.
Chile has still not formally annulled its amnesty law. But Chilean courts have not applied the amnesty law to crimes committed by the military or police during the Pinochet regime for several years now.
Brazil remains the sole holdout.
Even though the number of violations in Brazil during the years of dictatorship were relatively low, military officials have taken the position that any effort to bring cases to court is an affront to their institutional role, and would reopen unfinished debates about the legality of the 1964 coup. The Brazilian Supreme Court decided to uphold the amnesty law on grounds that the courts could not interfere with a political decision and that human rights commitments were only acquired subsequent to the crimes and so could not be the basis for overturning the law. Even so, the Brazilian government has paid reparations to victims and survivors, has held investigations, and is discussing a truth commission. Civil society groups and the Caravana da Anistia, the Amnesty Commission within the Justice Ministry, will be pushing the new Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to take a fresh look at the issue – especially given the increasingly solid regional consensus that formal amnesties, at least, are a thing of the past.

On August 24

On this day in ...
... 2004, reversing a decision by the intermediate court of appeals, the Supreme Court of Argentina ruled 5-3 that statutes of limitation do not apply to charges of crimes against humanity. The ruling in Arancibia Clavel, Enrique Lautaro s/ homicidio calificado y asociación ilícita y otros arose out of an appeal of a trial court's judgment convicting an agent of DINA, the secret police that operated in Argentine and Chile during the regime of former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet, with having committed homicide by use of explosives and for participation in a criminal association. Among the instruments that the Argentinian high court (above right) cited in its ruling were the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and the 1968 Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. (photo credit)

(Prior August 24 posts are here, here, and here.)

Garzón suspendido

The relationship of national laws with international law is, of course, the knot at the heart of the Garzón affair. Should Spain's 1977 Amnesty Law, which predates the Constitution, stand in the way of international legislation to which Spain is now signatory?

-- Journalist Julius Purcell, in an Atlantic dispatch from Barcelona, Spain, where on Friday Judge Baltasar Garzón was suspended and ordered to stand trial on an accusation related to his decision to investigate Franco-era crimes notwithstanding the national amnesty law. (credit for photo of Garzón, back to camera, and supporters outside courthouse immediately after suspension) Also pending against Garzón (prior posts), best known for his pursuit of Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet, are 2 other Spanish complaints, according to El Pais. These latter relate, 1st, to surveillance ordered in a corruption case, and 2d, to financing of a course at New York University.
The suspension occurred just 2 days after an International Criminal Court press release containing no mention of the judge's troubles at home confirmed that Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo's asked Garzón to come to The Hague "to work as a consultant for seven months, helping the office improve its investigative methods."
Purcell's Atlantic story -- which includes the answers of Spanish Magistrate Clara Bayarri and Chilean Judge Juan Guzmán to the question posed above -- is rich in detail and nuance. It's thus most welcome by anyone who's trying to sort out this complex story.

Guest Blogger: Alexandra Huneeus

The recent tragedy in Chile, and the second devastating earthquake to hit this hemisphere in as many months, keeps our attention turned to our southern neighbors. (See also this recent "on this day" noting the anniversary of Pinochet's release.) We thus welcome Dr. Alexandra Huneeus (left) as today's guest blogger. In her guest post below, she discusses her research on human rights litigation in Chile.
As Assistant Professor of Law and Legal Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison, Alex teaches public international law, sociology of law, human rights, and Latin American courts and politics. Her research focuses on politics, courts and human rights in Latin America. Before joining the UW faculty in 2007, Alex was a fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. She received her Ph.D. (2006) and her J.D. (2001) from the University of California, Berkeley.
Alex is the editor (with Javier Couso and Rachel Sieder), of Cultures of Legality: Judicialization and Political Activism in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Her article Judging from a Guilty Conscience: The Chilean Judiciary's Human Rights Turn (Law and Social Inquiry 2010) forms part of an ongoing inquiry into the prosecution of Pinochet-era crimes. She is also working on a project that examines the relationship of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and national courts. Alex is on the Board of the Law and Society Association, and is committed to the inter-disciplinary, empirical study of law.
As a fellow at the International Human Rights Clinic at Berkeley Law in 2004, she supervised students bringing a case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. She also worked on the case against Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Spain, through the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco. Prior to her turn to law, Alex worked as an editor and journalist in Santiago, Chile, and in San Francisco, writing for The San Francisco Chronicle, Business Week, El Mercurio, AmericaEconomia and Wired News.
Alex's IntLawGrrls foremother is Violeta Parra (left), the great Chilean composer and singer who wrote Gracias a La Vida. Parra wrote a song commemorating the 1960 earthquake in Chile (which is to this day the strongest earthquake on record) entitled Puerto Montt is Trembling (or "Shaking"). Alex chooses Parra in solidarity with the victims of the recent earthquake and because she devoted her music to understanding Chilean folk traditions and was from the South, so hardstruck by the earthquake this week.

Heartfelt Welcome, Alex!

Human rights turn in Chile's courts

(My thanks to the IntLawGrrls for allowing me to contribute this guest post about my most recent article, Judging from a Guilty Conscience: The Chilean Judiciary's Human Rights Turn (Law and Social Inquiry, 2010), with your audience).

I worked as a journalist in Chile from 1991-1994, the first years of the new democracy. At that time, it was considered inconvenient and something of a faux pas to make mention of the human rights legacy of the Pinochet regime (1973-1990), and most Pinochet-era human rights cases were suspended or closed.

Thus, when I returned in 1999 to conduct legal research for The Center for Justice and Accountability, I was amazed to find that news of prosecution of Pinochet-era crimes filled the front pages of all the kiosk papers. Suddenly, and for the first time, judges (such as Judge Guzman, at left, and Judge Valdovinos, at right below) were actively involved in investigating decades-old crimes they had for years ignored. These were the same judges who had denied over 90% of habeas corpus petitions filed during the height of the Pinochet regime’s violence, and who had been instrumental to legitimating the military regime. Since 1999, these very judges have sentenced more former officials of the military regime for human rights violations than judges of any other country in Latin America.

In this article, I seek to explain this dramatic turn. Extensive interviews with the judges revealed that the prosecutorial turn reflects the judiciary’s attempt to atone for its complicity with the dictatorship. The 1998 arrest of General Pinochet in London created pressure for prosecution of Pinochet-era human rights violations; but it is the contest over the judiciary’s legacy, as an important piece of post-authoritarian memory struggles, that explains why Chile’s notoriously illiberal judiciary ceded to that pressure. Understanding this redemptive dynamic is important, for judiciaries often emerge from a repressive regime with no sense of wrongdoing, quick to blame injustices on the executive, the legislature, or circumstances outside their control.

Virtually no professional group emerged from the Nazi era with so good a conscience as that of the jurists,

Ingo Müller writes (1991, 219). My article explains how this judicial consciousness came to change in Chile, with clear implications for the study of transitional justice, the spread of human rights norms, and the study of judicial politics.

In emphasizing the redemptive impetus, I do not deny that civil society, executive leadership and transnational networks of activists played key roles in the judicial turn. Nor do I mean to depict as heroic a judiciary that has been characterized by reticence and conservatism on rights issues. However, by focusing on the perspective of the judges themselves, the article opens a window on a transformation that has been little explored, and which led to important moments of justice.

One judge, for example, described his search for two men who had disappeared in 1973. The men had fled toward Argentina through the Andes. Thirty years later, a team led by the investigating judge retraced their steps, traveling 360 kilometers (224 miles) into the Andes by horseback:

We rode for ten days. . . . Perhaps an older judge would not have been able to do it. I was camping in the mountains, on the border with Argentina in a tent. . . . We worked with the Police. We worked with investigations. Digging everywhere . . . we found nothing. I took along the brother of one of the disappeared men. And that brother, on the last day, when we found nothing, said to me: “Your honor, do not feel badly. I am satisfied . . . after seeing you in front of all these people, working. After seeing you crawling and digging in the weeds, side by side with your assistants, and you were always the first. Now I am at peace with the justice system. If we cannot [find him] it is because it was impossible, not because the effort wasn’t made. And I think that my mother will be at peace now. She may even die on me now.” The mother passed away the following week. (Interviewee 22, March 11, 2004)

It is not normal practice for the judge to join this part of an investigation, to invite along plaintiffs, or to put so many resources into an expedition likely to fail. By doing so, however, the judge seeks to compensate for the judiciary’s past omissions and for its callousness to the victims of the Pinochet-era crimes. The underlying crime could not be solved, but, by the judge’s telling, the injustice that had been committed by the judiciary of not investigating was now undone. The image of the saddle-sore judge on his knees, with a victim as witness, conveys at once an act of penitence and an act of justice.

On March 2

On this day in ...
... 2000 (10 years ago today), Britain freed former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet (right) following 16 months of house arrest, during which lawyers engaged in "wrangling" (the BBC's word) over the request that Pinochet be extradited to Spain stand trial for torture that had occurred during his 17-year rule. As we've posted, Britain's House of Lords cleared the way for extradition; on this day, however, the British Executive exercised its prerogative to decline to honor Spain's request. Legal wrangling would continue to pursue Pinochet until 2006, when Pinochet died in Chile, under the cloud of national criminal investigation.

(Prior March 2 posts are here, here, and here)

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'How can they ask us to forget and turn the page, when the consequences for entire families and generations have been so terrible?'

-- Ana González (left), 84, speaking about her decades-long "tireless advocacy for answers about the estimated 3,000 people who were killed or disappeared under the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 to 1990." Profiled in a superb New York Times piece entitled "A Serene Advocate for Chile’s Disappeared," González lost her husband, 2 sons, and daughter-in-law when they disappeared in 1976. To this day she does not know what happened to them. (photo credit)

Arrests and Convictions of Rights Violators in Latin America: Justice Delayed but Not Denied

Simultaneous advances in the prosecution of grave international crimes by national courts took place in Guatemala and Chile yesterday.

Chile
In Chile, Investigating Judge Victor Montiglio issued arrests warrants for 129 former associates of the secret police (DINA) during the Pinochet years. The warrants involve members of all three branches of the military as well as the police, accused of working with the DINA to forcibly disappear suspected opponents of the government of General Augusto Pinochet during the 1970s. The cases on which the warrants are based include the forced disappearance of top leaders of the Communist Party, the killing of members of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, which at the time was portrayed as a result of internecine war within the left, and killings and disappearances as a result of Operation Condor, the South America-wide coordinated effort by the military regimes (with U.S. backing) to rid themselves of leftist activists. The judge indicated that he is pursuing anyone who was involved in the crimes, not just those “most responsible.”
A few interesting issues raised by the warrants:
► First, technically, Chile still has an amnesty law in place, and the center-left governments that succeeded Pinochet have been unable to overturn or “interpret” the law legislatively despite a clear decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in Caso Almonacid Arellano y otros v. Chile (2006), that the government must do so. Rather, the judiciary has itself interpreted the amnesty law so that it does not apply in cases involving either forced disappearances or other international crimes. The amnesty has not stopped indictments, trials and convictions (nor has the statute of limitations on the crimes, which has been held not to apply to either continuing crimes or crimes against humanity). Rather, Chile's Supreme Court, in a number of cases starting last year, has allowed convictions but then reduced the sentence greatly as a result of a procedural device called “half prescription.” Under this device, because the cases have taken so long to go forward, the defendant gets the applicable sentence reduced, and the aggravating factors that would otherwise increase the sentence do not apply. In a number of cases, convictions for the disappearance of sizable numbers of people have led to 3-to-7-year sentences: any sentence less than 5 years can be served on parole. This has led to an interesting debate in Chile:
► Is it better to convict but not punish the former security forces (most now quite elderly), or is that yet another affront to the victims?
This debate is sure to recur as the current crop of cases comes to trial.

Guatemala
In Guatemala yesterday, a trial court convicted Felipe Cusanero of 6 counts of enforced disappearance in the early 1980s. Cusanero was a military commissioner (local army representative) from Chimaltenango province outside the capital. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison for each count. The victims were Mayans from the village of Choatulún, and the disappearances were part of an estimated 200,000 deaths and 40,000 disappearances that took place from 1960 to 1996 in Guatemala. This is the first time a local court has convicted a military participant in the massacres that took place in the early 1980s, and the first time the Public Prosecutors’ office has successfully led a prosecution of crimes from that era. The three judges ruled that to condemn the accused on grounds of forced disappearance did not violate the prohibition on ex post facto law, since the underlying acts have long been criminal in both national and international law. The case was closely watched in the Guatemalan courts as a possible small break in the almost-total impunity that now exists for those who ordered and participated in massacres and widespread and systematic disappearances and torture during the “internal armed conflict” period. The judges -- Walter Paulino Jiménez Tixaj, Alba Delia Moscoso Linares y Neslie Guisela Cárdenas Bautista – showed tremendous courage in their verdict, given threats against them, and against any judge who dares hear witnesses or evidence about genocide or crimes against humanity in Guatemala.

So ... a good day for the fight against impunity for international crimes in the Americas. Eric Holder, are you listening?

On July 22

On this day in ...
... 1914 (95 years ago today), Hortensia Bussi was born in Valparaiso, Chile. As a young woman she taught history and geography, then worked at a government statistics institute. In 1939, while volunteering in a campaign to aid earthquake victims, she met Salvador Allende; they married the next year. Allende would run 3 times for President before he was finally elected in 1970. First Lady Bussi, pictured at left with President Allende, became active in social aid programs. But her husband died during the coup of September 11, 1973, which began decades of military rule by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Exiled in Mexico, Bussi, known as "Tencha," agitated against Pinochet's government; her contribution is recalled in this El Pais essay by writer and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman. Only after civilian rule was restored did she return home in 1990; there she died last month.
... 1937, "in a session as dramatic as any witnessed in the historic chamber in many years," the Senate voted 70-20 against President Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan to change the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court. The vote sent a bill that would have "packed the Court" by adding a new life-tenured Justice whenever an existing Justice became 70-1/2 years old back to committee, never to return again to the full Senate floor. (image credit) A day later Roosevelt would spin the defeat as victory, contending "that its very agitation caused the Supreme Court to reverse its position, and so advanced the country part way toward the original objectives of the bill"; namely, approval of his New Deal programs. FDR's spin was successful, for that is how historians speak of the controversy to this day.

(Prior July 22 posts are here and here.)

An end to universal jurisdiction?

(Thanks to IntLawGrrls for giving me this opportunity to contribute another guest post.)

El Congreso de los Disputados (left), Spain's lower house of Parliament, has passed a bill that would limit the reach of universal jurisdiction and profoundly restrict Spain's ability to prosecute serious human rights crimes. (The legislative push was mentioned in this prior IntLawGrrls post.) The bill, available in English translation here, will go before the Spanish Senate for a final vote in the fall.

As is well known, the Spanish universal jurisdiction law was used to pursue former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998. Since then, the law has allowed Spanish courts to stand as a last resort for victims who cannot find justice at home:

► Using this law, Spanish courts have issued warrants for top Rwandan leaders and convicted an Argentine official for "dirty war" killings.

► The law also forms the basis for the Guatemala Genocide Case and the 1989 Jesuits Massacre Case in El Salvador, both now being litigated by the Center for Justice & Accountability, the San Francisco-based nongovernmental organization for which I am Executive Director.

As detailed here, the bill is flawed, yet there may well be constructive means by which the Spanish legislature can clarify the application of the universal jurisdiction law. For instance, the proposed bill correctly adds crimes against humanity to the list of admissible crimes. But the amendment will do nothing to streamline the legal process or to weed out spurious claims from the many legitimate human rights cases that have been brought. Worse still, this amendment may close the doors of Spanish justice to thousands of survivors of human rights abuses. This bill should not become law.

We'll continue to work with the Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos de España, and other partners around the world, to oppose this legislation as it stands and to seek reforms that will protect this powerful tool for human rights.

Garzón goes for it

Losing jurisdiction over a civil-party complaint against 6 U.S. lawyers by the spin of a judges’ wheel in no way deterred Judge Baltasar Garzón (left) from investigating Bush Administration detention and interrogation practices.
In an auto made public this week, the Spanish judge opened an investigation into allegations of torture, made by 4 ex-detainees, over whose cases he had jurisdiction for the reason that they once were charged in Spain with criminal activity in support of al Qaeda. The 4, Garzón wrote,

claimed that they had suffered different acts of physical or psychological violence during the time of their detention in different countries, while they were under the authority of U.S. officials.

Sites named in the auto: Pakistan, Gambia, Afghanistan's Bagram Prison, and the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
A small sampling of the acts alleged by the 4, according to the auto:
► sleep deprivation and harm to vision, both caused by cells lighted all day and all night;
► constant broadcasting of "patriotic American songs" and other loud music;
► blows to the testicles and to the head;
► forced nudity;
► introduction of water into the nostrils to the point of a sensation of suffocation;
► subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold;
► protracted confinement in a dark, underground place;
► deprivation of food;
► death threats; and
► sexual assault.
Among the legal bases for the investigation the auto cites are the Spanish penal code, the 3d Geneva Convention, and the international Convention Against Torture and its European counterpart.

It's worth noting that the new case is broader than likely would have been authorized under the civil-party complaint. Whereas the latter named 6 Bush Administration lawyers, Garzón's auto makes clear that "intellectual authors" as well as "material implementers" of abuse, those who "authorized" abuse as well as those who "practiced" it, are fair game for his investigation. And if the Spanish court were to secure the presence of any suspect -- a big if -- personal jurisdiction would lie not only on ground of universality, but also that of passive personality. That's because among the 4 alleged victims are 2 nationals: a Spanish citizen and a Moroccan long resident in Spain.

The sweep of this new case ought not to surprise.

Garzón, of course, is the Madrid-based investigating judge whose name has been a human-rights-household word ever since October 1998, when Garzón asked Britain to arrest former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and then extradite him to Spain to face charges that he was responsible for torture of some Spaniards and many Chileans during his rule. Eventually, in January 2000, Britain’s executive refused to extradite notwithstanding a House of Lords ruling authorizing the transfer.
What had taken place in between – as Garzón described at a Stanford Law panel in which IntLawGrrls Naomi Roht-Arriaza and yours truly took part a while back – was an elaborate game of legal cat and mouse. Spain’s executive, which opposed the pursuit of Pinochet, did little to help Garzón as he went forward. At times Garzón enlisted the language skills of family members in order to secure translations of documents that had been delivered to him in English.

The cat and mouse game may resume, given that Spain's Attorney General has publicly opposed investigation by his country's judiciary of the United States' executive officials.

What might be the endgame?

It is true that Pinochet never did appear before a Spanish judge. But it's also true that when Pinochet went home he found that he was disgraced. By the time Pinochet died in 2006, lawsuits abounded against him. Chilean courts had stripped him of immunity. And he had twice endured questioning by an investigating judge -- not Garzón but Juan Guzmán (below left), a Chilean who sought to link him to some of the same crimes once at issue in Spain.
A full account of the facts of Pinochet likely will give cold comfort to the objects of Garzón’s newest investigation.

On October 16

On this day in ...
... 1793 (215 years ago today), the Austrian-born, 37-year-old, former Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, was guillotined in the midst of the French Revolution. Marie (right) had been imprisoned for more than a year; her husband, the deposed Louis XVI, had been executed 10 months earlier. The former queen's execution followed by 2 days her trial for a variety of charges, among them treason and sexual abuse of her son, who had been heir to the throne.
... 1998 (10 years ago today), British authorities acting upon an international warrant issued by Spain arrested former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who was in Britain for medical treatment. The arrest touched off years of litigation, which ended with Pinochet's return to Chile -- where he found himself the subject of criminal and civil suits, arising out of the brutality of his regime, until his death in 2006. (image credit)

On October 5

On this day in ...

... 1968 (40 years ago today), in Derry, Northern Ireland's 2d largest city, the political violence known as The Troubles began when police "used batons and water cannon to break up a civil rights march," injuring at least 30 persons. Unrest would cripple the region for 3 decades, ending only with the Good Friday Accords of 1998. (credit for photo © Derry Journal)

... 1988 (20 years ago today), by a margin of 10 percentage points, Chilean voters rejected Augusto Pinochet's bid for another 8 years as President. This rejection by plebiscite would prove a milestone in ending the reign of Pinochet, who, as a military general, had seized power in a bloody coup on September 11, 1973. When he died in 2006 Pinochet -- though he had avoided extradition from Britain to Spain on international criminal charges -- faced "numerous court cases that had sought to bring him to justice" in Chile. (credit for 1988 photo of Pinochet, at far right)

Death in absentia at home; trial abroad awaits

Le Monde reports that former Chadian President Hissène Habré (dressed in white in the photo at left) was convicted of crimes against humanity and yesterday sentenced to death by a criminal court in N'Djamena, Chad's capital city. But the defendant was not present: he's been in exile in Senegal since 1991.
"Africa's Pinochet" is the nickname that Human Rights Watch gave Habré, whose government is said to have "carried out some 40,000 politically motivated murders and 200,000 cases of torture" from when he seized power in 1982 and when he was deposed in 1990. That NGO maintains a Case against Habré webpage replete with documents and other links.
The premier situs for that case has not been Chad, however. Senegal indicted him, but its courts initially rebuffed the prosecution. Then Belgium issued an international arrest warrant. Senegal thus sought to extradite Habré, but its courts against rebuffed the effort. Then, in 2006, the African Union "[m]andate[d] the Republic of Senegal to prosecute and ensure that Hissène Habré is tried, on behalf of Africa, by a competent Senegalese court with guarantees for fair trial." And now? According to Le Monde,

Senegal's Minister of Justice, Madické Niang, indicated in July, after the country's legislature modified its Constitution to permit such a proceeding, that Dakar was 'ready' for the trial of Habré.

(credit for 2000 photo)

On September 11, ...

... 1857 (150 years ago today), more than 100 children, women, and men, emigrants in a wagon train headed from Arkansas to California, were killed when they made camp in Utah. As the Archeological Institute of America writes of this Mountain Meadows Massacre, "Who attacked the group is an ongoing debate, but historical accounts tell of a combined force of local Mormon militia and Paiute Indians. Executed in 1877, Mormon Bishop John D. Lee was the only person punished for the crime." The story is told as well at this LDS site, and is the subject of a just-released film, "September Dawn." The cairn above marks a mass grave.
... 1973, Chilean President Salvador Allende died in a coup d'état led by his military chief, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Allende, as the BBC reported, was "the world's first democratically-elected Marxist head of state" -- a status that made him a target for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, said to have "backed" the military "uprising."
... 2001, hijackers used U.S. civilian airliners as tools of terrorism. The World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington each were hit, killing thousands; a 3d jet crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The September 11 attacks touched off a campaign that U.S. officials dubbed GWOT, the global war on terror. The attacks were attributed to the Al Qaeda network, whose leader, Osama bin Laden, remains at large to this day.

On July 6, ...

1907 (100 years ago today), Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico City to Guillermo, a Germany-born photographer of Hungarian Jewish descent, and Matilda, of Spanish and Native American ancestry. Convalescence forced by an accident in her 20s prompted Frida to begin the painting career for which she remains famous. Her husband, the painter Diego Rivera, was 1 of the loves of her life. She lived in the United States as well as Mexico, as depicted in this self-portrait on the border. Also "active in leftist causes," shortly before her death in 1954 a wheelchair-bound Kahlo appeared publicly to support "Communist-backed President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala."
... 2005, by a vote of 11 to 10, a Chilean court stripped former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet of immunity from prosecution on charges relating to the killings in 1975 of 119 dissidents. On appeal some lifting of immunity was approved, but Pinochet died in 2006 before any trial commenced.