Sweet justice:
Drucker, Linda
VERDICT FROM SAN JOSE SWEET JUSTICE DECIDING FOR THE DISAPPEARED For the family of Manfredo Velasquez, justice came neither too easily nor too soon. Velasquez was an elementary school teacher and...
...At that time Honduras was controlled by a U.S.-backed military strongman, Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, known for his fanatical, almost messianic anticommu-nism and vociferous support of the contras...
...The star witness was a Honduran military defector, Florencion Caballero, who admitted participating in the kidnapping and described in graphic detail the inner workings of a clandestine death squad unit, known as "Battalion 316," established by the Honduran military...
...Then thirty-five years old, with a wife and small child, Velasquez was never seen alive again...
...She was released by the same Honduran authorities, who, throughout her captivity, repeatedly denied having any knowledge of her whereabouts...
...Human rights activists believe the verdict in the Velasquez case will not only set a precedent for the bringing of future charges against other Latin American regimes, but will also help to depoliticize the human rights issue-which some Latin governments have historically considered to be a pretext used by leftist and Marxist groups to mobilize antigovernment support...
...The court, which is the judicial arm of the Organization of American States (OAS), found the Honduran government guilty in the kidnapping and disappearance of Manfredo Velasquez and ordered it to pay money damages to Velasquez's family...
...The opposition will no longer be able to claim that there is no tribunal sufficiently impartial to pass judgment on the accuracy of its charges...
...is one of those governments that have declined to accept the court's jurisdiction...
...While some fear that few new governments will accede to the court's jurisdiction now that there seem to be real teeth in the court's enforcement powers, the verdict represents the coming of age of the Inter-American Court...
...These laws allow governments to practice mass detention without charges, and other suspensions of constitutional guarantees, which may provide a defense for human rights violators...
...One of the court's major advantages is that the judges do not represent their governments, only their individual consciences...
...In contrast, the international law applied by the Inter-American Court considers such practices per se violations of human rights...
...The Velasquez case against Honduras is the first time the court has presided over an adversarial courtroom proceeding which involved live testimony, from some eighteen witnesses, over an eight-month period of hearings and deliberations...
...The Honduran government has said it will respect the ruling, although it has denied that it is admitting guilt by paying damages...
...At age ten he was one of the youngest survivors at Auschwitz...
...The court heard the dramatic account of a young law school graduate, Ines Muril-lo, who was imprisoned in a secret jail where she was tortured and sexually abused for seventy-nine days...
...Before hearing the Honduran case, the court's role had been limited to interpreting the human rights convention for member states-if and when they asked for clarification...
...In the Honduran case, the prosecution was able to marshal unusually strong evidence of military participation in the death squads...
...The court also held that there is sufficient evidence to prove that members of the Honduran armed forces engaged in a systematic practice of "disappearing" political opponents between 1981 and 1984...
...As one attorney testified, only partly exaggerating,' 'The only thing that happened when an attorney filed a petition on behalf of a desaparecido was that the attorney himself disappeared...
...The witnesses painted a picture of a government whose judiciary was incapable of preventing, investigating, or punishing human rights abuses by the military...
...What it did not say is that the military officers, named by witnesses as the commanders of the battalion that operated the death squads, still occupy influential positions in the Honduran military and, in some cases, have been promoted...
...Early this year, fearing for her life in the wake of the assassination of a fellow human rights activist, she left Honduras for the United States...
...For what she describes as'' seven long years,'' well after she had given up her own brother for dead, Zenaida Velasquez struggled to prevent the Honduran public from forgetting about the desaparecidos...
...In 1985, for example, at the request of Costa Rica, the court issued an advisory opinion, holding that Costa Rica's system of requiring journalists to obtain government licenses before they could practice their profession violated the Convention's guarantee of freedom of expression...
...The court has demonstrated that it can conduct an impartial trial and command respect for its verdict...
...She organized the ragtag army of girlfriends, mothers, and wives of the disappeared into a cohesive organization that marched in front of the Honduran chamber of deputies, waving photos of their missing loved ones...
...The court also heard from the relatives of the missing, from attorneys who had filed habeas corpus petitions on their behalf, and from human rights activists and congressmen who had conducted investigations into the disappearances...
...justice is German-born Emory University law professor Thomas Buergenthal, who has had his own first-hand experience with oppression...
...Housed in a stately marble edifice in a residential neighborhood in San Jose, Costa Rica, the Inter-American Court was established by the OAS in 1979 to enforce the American Convention of Human Rights...
...Garrison in New York...
...Domestic prosecution is likely to result in acquittals because of the enormous political influence of the military and because of domestic "state of siege" laws...
...Velasquez was an elementary school teacher and graduate student in economics when he was kidnapped in a parking lot by plainclothes Honduran army agents in September, 1981...
...Governments will no longer be able to dismiss charges of human rights abuses as propaganda by the opposition...
...The Velasquez case is significant because it is the first time an international tribunal has judged a Latin American government guilty of death squad killings...
...She traveled from one army garrison to another, asking for information on her brother's whereabouts...
...The U.S...
...The Convention, signed by sixteen American countries, still has not been ratified by the United States...
...The Honduran government's position was hardly helped by the fact that while the court was still hearing evidence, two prosecution witnesses were brutally gunned down, one of them after having received a black tie in the mail with a note advising him to wear it to his funeral...
...The court's seven justices-six Latins and one American-are prominent judges or law professors in their respective countries...
...Three other cases involving disappearances that took place in Honduras are still pending...
...Moreover, the government took pains to point out that the disappearances occurred in 1981 under a different government...
...The amount of the damages is to be negotiated between the government and the family under the court's supervision...
...He was one of some 150 Hondurans suspected by their government of involvement in leftist activities who "disappeared" between 1981 and 1984...
...LINDA DRUCKER Linda Drucker, a former journalist in Central America, is managing editor of the Stanford Journal of International Law and a summer associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York...
...Justice was particularly sweet for the Velasquez family when it came on July 29,1988 in the form of an unprecedented ruling from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights...
...While the hundred-odd disappearances that occurred in Honduras were far fewer than the thousands that took place in Argentina and El Salvador, charges were leveled against Honduras because it is one of only a handful of countries in the hemisphere that have formally accepted the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court...
...Fired from her government job as a social worker, she herself was detained and questioned by Honduran authorities on several occasions...
...Velasquez's younger sister, Zenaida, refused to let her brother's memory die...
...So far, ten governments have acceded to the court's jurisdiction, but most have also signed reservations prohibiting the prosecution of violations that occurred before they signed the human rights convention...
...The only other cases to date have involved prosecutions brought by a government against its own military officers in domestic courts...
...The U.S...
...When that failed, she hired lawyers to file habeas corpus petitions seeking his release...
Vol. 115 • September 1988 • No. 15
