MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chilean High Court defends Pinochet time record.

Chile's Supreme Court categorically denied Friday that it was an “accomplice” in the torture and murder of dissidents during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

In a statement read by Chief Justice Marcos Libedinsky, the Court rejects claims in the recently released Valech Report on torture during the military regime, arguing that they are groundless, lack objectivity and are "impossible to accept".

"There are no reliable records, nor is it plausible to maintain, that distinguished magistrates could have conspired with third parties to allow illegal detentions, torture, abductions and deaths" said the high court release which, according to judicial sources, was supported by 16 of the tribunal's 18 members.

The torture and human rights abuse report sponsored by the current President Ricardo Lagos administration which was elaborated by a panel of personalities headed by Catholic Bishop Sergio Valech certified 27,255 cases of torture under the Pinochet regime and states that in the period immediately after the September 11, 1973 coup, the courts engaged in "connivance or complicity with those committing the excesses and violations".

The Supreme Court insisted that Chile's judges and courts found themselves severely hampered and limited in the wake of the military putsch "mainly because of the states of emergency decreed" by the military junta.

In the period extending from 1973 to 1978, according to the Valech Report, Chilean courts rejected some 10,000 habeas corpus requests filed on behalf of detainees. Commission investigators further investigated that most of those prisoners were tortured and many of them were killed in custody.

Courts inaction and the Supreme Court's abdication in "monitoring military tribunals" during the Pinochet years led to some of the most serious abuses against persons and disregard for the rule of the law highlights the Valech Report.

In coincidence with the International Human Rights Day, December 10, a group representing former political prisoners delivered to Chief Justice Libedinsky their own report on Pinochet-era abuses, titled "We, the Survivors, Accuse".

Unlike the Valech Report, which following Lagos administration's insistence concealed the identities of the torturers and their accomplices, the Survivors document claims it lists all names.