MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Fearing Pinochet 1998 experience, former US president Bush cuts short EU visit

Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet and former president George Bush

When former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet flew to Europe in 1998 for a vacation and back surgery, little did he know that he would be jailed by British authorities (acting on a Spanish arrest warrant) for human rights violations that occurred during his 17-year dictatorship.

The precedent created by Pinochet’s imprisonment — it was the first time ever British authorities arrested a former head of state for human rights violations — appears to be alive and well in 2011.

A U.S.-based human rights group claimed this week that former U.S. President George W. Bush cancelled a speaking engagement in Geneva, Switzerland, set for Feb. 12, fearful of his arrest on human rights violations.

Event organizers nevertheless insist the speech was cancelled not because of the threatened lawsuit, but for fears that demonstrators would get violent.

Organizers of a rally outside the Hotel Wilson, where the speech was scheduled to take place, had called on demonstrators to each bring a shoe, an effort to echo the assault on Bush during a news conference in Baghdad in 2008 when an Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at him.

“Whatever Bush or his hosts say, we have no doubt he cancelled his trip to avoid our lawsuit,” said a spokesman for the New York City based Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR).

“The message from civil society is clear – If you’re a torturer, be careful in your travel plans. It’s a slow process for accountability, but we keep going”.

The CCR, with the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) and Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), spent weeks preparing a 2,500 page torture case against Bush that would have been filed on Monday, Feb. 7–the anniversary of the day, nine years ago, when Bush decided the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply to ‘enemy combatants’”.

Instead, the indictment against Bush was formally released at a press conference on Monday at the Swiss Press Club.

The CCR, in addition to filing the first cases representing men detained at Guantánamo, has filed universal jurisdiction cases seeking accountability for torture by Bush administration officials in Germany and France, and submitted expert opinions and other documentation to ongoing cases in Spain in collaboration with the European Human Rights Commission.

A Bush spokesperson noted that the former President had travelled to Canada, Brazil, China, Japan, South Korea and the Middle East since leaving office, but that this was his first scheduled trip to Europe.

In Chile, it is widely known that many top echelon lieutenants from the dictatorship carefully avoid trips to Europe so as not to repeat Pinochet’s hard-learned lesson.

The former Chilean dictator ultimately got off the hook in London. Not because of sovereign immunity or “former head of state” arguments – which previously were the legal justification for not prosecuting – but for humanitarian grounds: his age and health.

Implicitly, then, British authorities ruled that a former head of state may be brought to court for egregious human rights violations should a prosecutor esteem the case viable.

By Steve Anderson – Santiago Times