MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Leading Argentine candidate said to be against impunity laws.

Nestor Kirchner, the heavily favored frontrunner in Argentina's presidential runoff, is opposed to existing laws that allowed human rights violators under the military dictatorship to go unpunished, activists said here on Friday.

Estela Carlotto, the head of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo group, told DyN news agency on Friday that Kirchner "backs the opinion of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights regarding the laws' invalidity." The so-called Punto Final and Due Obedience laws were enacted in 1987 by the government of Raul Alfonsin.

The Punto Final law set a short time limit for levelling criminal charges against alleged human rights violators, while the Due Obedience law stated that those soldiers and police who were following orders could not be punished for their crimes.

In a questionnaire sent to each of the presidential candidates in the April 27 election, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo asked them to describe the human rights policy they would implement if elected. Kirchner "replied saying that he concurs entirely with the opinion of the Inter-American Court," Carlotto said.

The Santa Fe governor and ex-President Carlos Menem, both members of the ruling Peronist Party, grabbed the top two spots in a crowded field in last month's election and will face each other on May 18.

Earlier this week, Menem urged the Supreme Court to "close the wounds of the past" and to uphold both laws as valid. Although congress repealed the laws in 1999, it did not annul them as recommended by the Inter-American Human Rights Court - and demanded by the relatives of the thousands of victims of the military dictatorship.

Those who were eventually tried and convicted of rights violations were later pardoned by Menem. However, several federal judges investigating the kidnapping and illegal adoptions of children of the so-called disappeared have declared the laws unconstitutional, and the case has been appealed to the Supreme Court, which has yet to issue its ruling.

Several human rights groups have accused the current government of caretaker President Eduardo Duhalde of pressuring the nine Supreme Court justices to recognize the validity of the controversial laws.

Although Menem, whose 1989-1999 administration was marked by a strong whiff of corruption, finished slightly ahead of Kirchner in the first-round vote, the provincial governor now leads the ex-president by some 40 percent in most polls.

Around 60 percent of Argentines are telling pollsters that they would not vote for Menem under any circumstances.

Kirchner, the governor of a sparsely populated province in remote Patagonia, enjoys the enthusiastic support of Duhalde and has already begun a victory-lap-like tour of regional nations to meet with heads of state.

He is accompanied by current Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna, who is expected to stay on if Kirchner wins.