In a curious game of judicial ping-pong, a Madrid judge has sent an important case back to the National Criminal Court, specifically to the department that was led by Judge Baltasar Garzón before his controversial suspension, and which is now headed by Judge Pablo Ruz, El País reports. The case, which involves the...
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Giles Tremlett reports for the Guardian:
In a stark reversal of roles, an Argentine judge has taken a step towards opening the first comprehensive investigation into the human rights abuses of General Franco's dictatorship in Spain. Judge María Servini has asked Spain to declare whether its...
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In a press release coinciding with the twelfth anniversary of Judge Garzón's request for detention of Augusto Pinochet (1998) and the second anniversary of his brief (auto) opening an investigation into Francoist crimes against humanity, the Spanish section of Amnesty International has decried Spain's increasingly lackluster record in the fight against impunity,...
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Spanish Supreme Court Justice Manuel Marchena, who is prosecuting Judge Baltasar Garzón for alleged irregularities related to courses taught at New York University in a program cosponsored by some Spanish banks and corporations, has himself frequently given talks and classes paid for by some 25 different corporate sponsorships, Público reveals. Moreover, neither Marchena...
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This past May Javier Nuñéz, reporting for Deia, interviewed Ludivina García and Ceferino Álvarez (who passed away in August), of the Association of Descendents of Spanish Civil War exiles, on the the Garzón case and the quality of Spanish democracy.
When asked what they thought about Garzón being debarred...
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"Activist judges like Garzón, Andreu, and Pedraz have created a big diplomatic headache for the Zapatero government." An overview of this past two years' developments at Project Censored: Media Democracy in Action:
In October 2009, under great pressure from the United States, the government of Spain decided to limit its own...
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Impunity Watch at Syracuse University reports:
A representative from Spain told the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday that they would not be investigating alleged war crimes committed during the Francisco Franco dictatorship in accordance with an amnesty law passed by the Spanish government in 1977. Mexico had called on...
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In a strongly worded op-ed piece in today's Público, Carlos Jiménez Villarejo, former Chief Prosecutor for corruption cases, chides the Spanish Supreme Court for the cavalier way in which it recently dismissed Judge Baltasar Garzón's appeal. (More background here.) According to Jiménez, the Supreme Court should have given much more serious consideration to...
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EFE reports that former Chilean president Michele Bachelet, visiting in Spain last week, defended the need for historical memory and, in particular, the way in which Chile has dealt with its repressive past through judicial means--notably different from Spain. In response to a question about the controversy surrounding Judge Garzón's attempt to open...
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The 74th annual Bay Area reunion of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, held in Berkeley, California, on May 30, paid tribute to the legal work of Judge Baltasar Garzón in challenging decades of silence about mass murders conducted during the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. The program, part of...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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A new episode of the podcast “Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War” is now available. In the podcast, which premiered in October 2024, historians Patricia Schechter and Dan Czitrom discuss the impact of the Spanish war on their and others’ families. This episode features the children of Anna and Alvin Warren. Below is a...
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In 2025 the fourth stage of ALBA’s Passport Project wrapped up. The fourth stage focused on volunteers on whom we have very little information to enable a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) search. Most of the volunteers submitted had at least a year of birth to reference. Expectations...
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On the fiftieth anniversary of Franco’s death, the New York Times published an article by Jason Horowitz about the “nostalgia” for Francisco Franco being expressed by a growing number of younger Spaniards, most of whom have no direct experience of the dictator. As is common these days in the Times’ coverage of any number...
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The family of Paul Andrew Mooney (1910-1961) is searching for documentation to substantiate information he provided to his family about serving in the International Brigades. Paul Mooney was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Hughes High School in 1929 and attended the University of Cincinnati in 1929, 1935 and 1936. In...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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The first thirty-six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Phase IV were submitted December 30, 2024. Phase IV is intended to focus on volunteers on whom we have minimal information. At some point in the future, I plan to resubmit some volunteers who were returned as not found or on whom no information...
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My grandfather (Nana), Suresh, moved to the United States in 1959 as a young man on a student visa pursuing his master’s degree. His parents, my great grandparents, sought value in being ‘foreign educated’ and bringing his education home – to Mumbai, India to run their family business. 2 years after my Nana moved...
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Peter N. Carroll, a respected and prolific writer, poet, and US historian, died after a short illness on September 16, surrounded by his family. He was 80. Born in New York City in 1943 to a secular Jewish family, Peter grew up in the Bronx and Queens, where his father worked as a composer,...
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LA RÉPUBLIQUE -QUOTIDINEN DE COMBAT RADICAL ET SOCIALISTE, February 5, 1938 Foreign Volunteer Arrested On March 27 last, 29 North Americans were arrested on board the boat Sans-Pareil while they were attempting to reach the Spanish Coast. They were sentenced to a prison term for violating the decree of February 18, 1937 on the...
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The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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