Macri nominates lawyer for Dirty War-era torturer as Argentine representative to the IACHR

Argentine President Mauricio Macri is being denounced by human rights advocates for his nomination of Carlos Horacio de Casas as the nation's representative before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR).

De Casas, a corporate lawyer, served as defense attorney for retired Lt. Col. Enrique Blas Gómez Saa, in a case filed against him for multiple kidnappings and torture during the last dictatorship in the late 1970s.

"The nominee lacks any experience in the defense of Human Rights in our country," the nation's leading human rights organizations pointed out in a joint open letter. "Indeed, his only role related in any way to Human Rights was as defense attorney for one of those accused of perpetrating abuses."

Gómez Saa, former deputy intelligence chief of the Army's VIII Infantry Brigade in Mendoza Province, was charged in 2013 with the abduction and torture of Roberto Vélez, Oscar Guidone, and Martin Lecea. De Casas succeeded in shielding Gómez Saa from prosecution when, in 2015, a provincial court found the defendant mentally unfit to stand trial. The report on which the court made its finding was prepared by Gómez Saa's son-in-law.

Critics point out moreover that de Casas' law career has been largely spent defending corporate clients against fraud charges.

Perhaps the most infamous of these was that of the Peirano Basso brothers, whom de Casas defended from extradition proceedings after the collapse of Banco Velox in 2002. The three brothers, who like de Casas belong to the right-wing Catholic power group Opus Dei, were later extradited and convicted of aggravated fraud after transferring $800 million from Velox to a Cayman Islands offshore bank, leading to Velox's insolvency and losses for thousands of depositors.

De Casas' nomination was reportedly approved by Justice Minister Germán Garavano on the advice of former Senator Ernesto Sanz, a leading right-wing figure who like de Casas and Gómez Saa hails from Mendoza Province. Garavano had already been denounced by human rights advocates last April for holding secret talks with Argentina's most vocal Dirty War apologist, Cecilia Pando, over the possibility of freeing the 681 officers convicted since 2005 of crimes against humanity.

The IACHR itself admonished Macri on December 4 to immediately release Milagro Sala, a political opponent and indigenous rights advocate whose imprisonment has been ruled arbitrary and illegal by both the IACHR and the UN.

At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pagina12.com.ar%2F18273-macri-envia-a-la-cidh-a-un-defensor-de-represores

[center]

Macri and his "Mr. Human Rights," Carlos de Casas.[/center]