Argentine Supreme Court declares Riveros pardon unconstitutional

Friday, July 13, 2007

The Supreme Court of Argentina today ruled that a decree issued by the Argentine ex-president Carlos Saúl Menem was unconstitutional. The decree pardoned military general Santiago Omar Riveros, charged for crimes against humanity which were committed during the "Guerra Sucia", a military rule (1976-1983) in Argentina.

The members of the Supreme Court of Justice decided by a majority of four votes the revoke of the pardon towards Riveros. The votes were as follows:

Support

Ricardo Lorenzetti
Juan Carlos Maqueda
Eugenio Zaffaroni
Elena Highton

Oppose

Carlos Fayt
Carmen Argibay

Abstain

Enrique Petracchi

The Supreme Court thus retracted the pardon towards Riveros. The ruling also left an open door for the cases of other pardoned generals, such as Jorge Videla and Eduardo Massera.

"Crimes against humanity, because of their seriousness in nature, are not only contrary to the Constitución Nacional, but as well to the entire international community," the Supreme Court ruled. Nearly 30,000 disappeared in the Argentina military dictatiorship.

Sources

This is a complete or partial translation of the article "La Corte Suprema de Argentina revocó los indultos a los jefes militares", from the Spanish language Wikinews, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

Daniel Schweimler. "Argentine court overturns pardon" — BBC News, July 13, 2007
"La Corte Suprema anuló los indultos de Carlos Menem a jefes militares" — Clarín (newspaper), July 13, 2007 (Spanish)
"La Corte Suprema anuló los indultos" — La Nación, July 13, 2007 (Spanish)

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Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.