MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentine Senate annuls amnesty laws on human rights violations

The Argentine Senate on Thursday annulled amnesty laws which benefited 1,000 mainly soldiers and police officers accused of committing human rights violations during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

The governing Peronist bloc and some dissident legislators from the opposition Radical Civil Union (UCR) voted to void the controversial Full Stop and Due Obedience laws early Thursday. The vote came after speeches by more than 30 senators Wednesday evening prolonged a session which had already lasted more than four hours.

In a vote eight days ago, the lower house of the legislature voided the laws, although the Supreme Court is ultimately responsible for deciding their validity.

As the senators debated the bill, hundreds of people summoned by political parties, human rights organizations, unions and social, student and jobless groups demonstrated outside Congress to demand the scrapping of the laws, which are also known as the "impunity" laws.

Analysts said the bill was an important political signal to the Supreme Court, which must now rule on the validity, or lack thereof, of the laws enacted by the government of President Raul Alfonsin (1983-1989), which succeeded the right-wing military regime.

During the military junta's rule in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at least 9,000 and perhaps as many as 30,000 leftists were arrested, tortured and killed for their political activities. As soon as the session began, the Senate approved a bill sent over by the executive, after being passed by the lower house last week, which gives constitutional rank to the International Convention on Non-Prescription of Crimes of War and Against Humanity.

The ratification of this 1968 United Nations convention sends another political message to the Supreme Court, which has been studying the constitutionality of the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws for more than two years.

If the court declares these controversial laws void, the trial of officers of the security forces charged with crimes against humanity under the dictatorship could resume, even though legal debate on the scope of the ruling would rage on.

The validity of the laws again took center stage when Argentine President Nestor Kirchner decided to eliminate a decree automatically rejecting extradition requests for former officers.

This move precipitated the arrests of the former repressors for extradition at the request of Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon, who indicted 46 Argentine citizens on charges of mass murder, state terrorism and torture and is intent on trying them in Madrid. But Kirchner wants the indicted officers to be tried in Argentina and for this he needs the Supreme Court to annul the amnesty laws.