Spain's super-judge closer to being charged

MADRID -- The magistrate known for indicting Osama bin Laden and Augusto Pinochet may have knowingly acted without jurisdiction by probing Spanish Civil War atrocities, a court said Thursday in a ruling that takes Spain's most famed judge a step closer to being put on trial himself.

Those atrocities - the killings of tens of thousands of civilians by forces loyal to Gen. Francisco Franco during the 1936-39 war and in the early years of the Franco regime - were covered by an amnesty passed by Parliament in 1977, two years after Franco died.

But Garzon ignored this and in 2008 launched his probe anyway, Lucio Varela, an investigating magistrate at the Supreme Court, wrote in the 55-page ruling.

A five-judge panel at the court will eventually decide whether to drop the case or let Varela decide on bringing charges and putting Garzon on trial. If convicted of knowingly acting without jurisdiction, Garzon could be suspended from the bench for years.

Garzon has denied any wrongdoing. He began his probe in the summer of 2008 but reluctantly bowed out a few months later in a dispute over jurisdiction, transferring the case to provincial courts.

His short-lived probe was Spain's first official one ever of a dark and largely unexplored chapter in the country's past, and it was widely seen as seeking an indictment of the Franco regime itself.

Last year a conservative group called Manos Libres filed a complaint against Garzon for having launched the investigation in the first place, and the Supreme Court agreed to study it. Varela was assigned to the case.

He wrote Thursday that Garzon "consciously decided to ignore or push aside" the will of the Spanish Parliament in decreeing the 1977 amnesty to help the country move toward reconciliation.

Over the past decade Garzon gained fame worldwide as the most prominent symbol of Spain's doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which holds that heinous crimes like torture or terrorism can be tried in this country even if they are alleged to have been committed elsewhere and had no link to Spain.

He used it in 1998 to go after Pinochet, having the ex-despot arrested during a visit to London, although Britain ultimately refused to extradite him to Madrid for trial. Garzon indicted bin Laden in 2003 over the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the U. S.

Source:washingtonpost.com/