Judge Garzón has been sentenced to an 11 year suspension and a 2,500 euro fine for prevarication in relation to his investigation of a wide-ranging corruption ring involving the Valencia branch of the ruling conservative Partido Popular. The Supreme Court tribunal judging the case voted unanimously to find the judge guilty. This is the...
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(Read the full press release here. En castellano.) On May 13, 2012, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives will present the Second ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, in the amount of $100,000, to Fredy Peccerelli, Executive Director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, and Kate Doyle, Senior Analyst of U.S. policy in Latin...
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Jim Jump just sent us the latest issue (pdf) of the wonderful newsletter of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, featuring coverage of the 75 anniversary celebrations, a review of the IB musical by Karl Lewkowicz and Judith Johnson, book reviews, and more.  Click here to access the newsletter in pdf.
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Many thought the day would never come. And yet this past week, a handful of aging victims of Francoist repression appeared before Spain's Supreme Court to tell the horrifying stories of how their parents or grandparents were dragged from their houses and shot by Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War. In other...
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"Judge Garzón’s trial," the New York Times editorialized yesterday, "is a disturbing echo of the Franco era’s totalitarian thinking." The charge that the judge overstepped his authority when he ordered in inquiry into Franco's crimes are baseless, the paper argues, because "under international law, there can be no amnesty for crimes against humanity and...
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Thousands of protesters, led a group of prominent writers, actors, and activists, took to the streets in Madrid this weekend to express their indignation at the persecution of Judge Baltasar Garzón. Meanwhile, an increasing number of judicial and human-rights experts in Spain and elsewhere fear that the three Supreme Court cases against the judge...
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Our friends Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís report: Exactly one year after the release of our film Granito: How To Nail A Dictator at the Sundance Film Festival, the ex-dictator of Guatemala, General Efraín Ríos Montt, was brought up on charges of genocide in a Guatemalan court and placed under house arrest. The culmination...
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Spanish Supreme Court Judge Manuel Marchena, in charge of the third case pending against Garzón, concluded the investigative stage yesterday with a brief charging the Judge with “cohecho impropio,” that is, the appearance of bribery by accepting a gift from an interested party. Marchena has significantly downscaled the original charge of prevarication, or knowingly...
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Ivry sur Seine, a working class municipality on the southern outskirts of Paris, celebrated ten sons of the town who were killed in Spain fighting in the International Brigades yesterday when a plaque in their honor was unveiled. The ceremony was organized by the ACER (Asociation of Friends of Combattants in Republican Spain, for...
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The trial against Garzón "is fueled by domestic political vendettas rather than substantive legal arguments," Dan Kaufman writes in today's New York Times, "and it could dramatically set back international efforts to hold human-rights violators accountable for their crimes."

The Supreme Court’s zeal to try him has little legal basis; rather, it reflects...
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