MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chile: Case against Piñera brought before The Hague for alleged human rights violations in 2019

The ICC does not have a deadline to decide whether to admit the accusation, making a prompt response unlikely.

Chilean and human rights organizations together with former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón filed an accusation Thursday before the International Criminal Court (ICC) against President Sebastián Piñera for his alleged involvement in crimes against humanity during the 2019 protests, it was reported.

”Garzón, the Chilean Human Rights Commission (CCHDH) and other organizations today sent a letter to the attorney general of the International Criminal Court (ICC), lawyer Fatou Bensouda, in the Dutch city of The Hague for the court to investigate, accuse and initiate a trial of President Sebastián Piñera for crimes against humanity that have been committed since October 2019,” reported the Center for Journalistic Investigation (Ciper).

The document presented calls for the prosecution of Piñera and all officials and members of the security forces involved in the repression of the protests of a year and a half ago, in the belief that widespread and systematic crimes against humanity were committed.

According to the plaintiffs, the Chilean Justice filed more than 3,000 cases of human rights violations without investigation, which in their opinion “highlights the impunity that exists in Chile.”

”The cases are fraudulently classified and investigated in Chile as common crimes, with the deliberate purpose, first of all, to remove them from the jurisdiction of the ICC and, secondly, to prepare the conditions that would favour their subsequent impunity with the eventual application of the prescription (statute of limitations) rules, or through the application of possible pardons, amnesties or end-of-term laws,“ the plaintiffs argued before The Hague.

The ICC does not have a deadline to decide whether to admit the accusation, making a prompt response unlikely.

In October 2019, a wave of protests challenged the Piñera government, which responded with harsh repression that left about thirty dead, 460 people with eye injuries and more than 8,800 complaints about ”crimes committed by state agents to a report from the National State Attorney's Office.

These complaints were confirmed by reports from the United Nations, Amnesty International, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Human Rights Watch and the National Institute for Human Rights.