Amnesties for Dictatorship Crimes Slowly Crumble

Amnesties for Dictatorship Crimes Slowly Crumble
By Marcela Valente*

BUENOS AIRES, Sep 13, 2010 (IPS) - At very different paces, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay advance down the path towards annulling or at least neutralising the laws that protected those responsible for human rights crimes committed under their dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s.

"The political processes and legal systems of each country are very different," Argentine Víctor Abramovich, executive secretary of the Institute of Human Rights Public Policies of Mercosur (Southern Cone Common Market), told IPS.

It is preferable to "analyse the advances of each one, without comparing or ranking them," added the jurist, who served as vice-president of the Inter- American Commission on Human Rights and was recently elected to head this new Institute of the Mercosur bloc, comprising Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay, with Venezuela in the process towards full membership.

Abramovich served as director of the non-governmental Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) in 2001, when Argentine judges began to declare unconstitutional the "full stop" and "due obedience" laws, which in the mid- 1980s had suspended the lawsuits against the officials and hundreds of people responsible for the torture and forced disappearances of the 1974- 1983 dictatorship.

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