MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Fifty years identity secrecy for torturers in Chile

Chile's Supreme Court ruled Friday that authorities can withhold for 50 years the identity of people found to have inflicted torture on political prisoners during the 1973 to 1990 Pinochet regime.

The justices voted unanimously to uphold the confidentiality standard established by the commission that investigated abuses under the military regime.

In 2004, a panel headed by Catholic Bishop Sergio Valech issued a report saying that some 28,000 people had been tortured in custody by agents of General Augusto Pinochet's government.

Though the document contained a wealth of detail, the commission decided to keep the names of both victims and perpetrators secret for 50 years. Several human rights lawyers had asked the Supreme Court to overturn the confidentiality provision, contending that protecting the identity of torturers amounts to granting them impunity for their crimes.

About a month after the publication of the commission's findings, a group of former political prisoners released an alternative to the Valech Report in which they named nearly 2.000 people they said had been involved in human rights abuses, torture or concealing the crime.