Memory, impunity, justice and democracy

On behalf of the Asociación Catalana de Juristas Demócratas (ACJD), we present you the International Meeting about “Impunity as an obstacle in the processes of democratic construction: the efficiency of transnacional justice (the experiences of Latin America and Spain)”.

The ACJD is a non-profit institution, that gets together lawyers, teachers, judges, attorneys, law students… some of its members participated in the struggle against the Dictatorship of Franco, both defending the political opponents prosecuted under Franco, (in the Court-Martial and in the so called Public Order Courts) and in the organisation and struggle of social movements against the Dictatorship.

Twenty years after the creation of the Association, the defence of Human Rights is still one of its main goals, just like the constant effort of ACJD to keep memory alive about what happened during the dictatorship period.

The revision of the sentences imposed by the Franco courts to the political opponents and other victims of the Franco regime is something the Spanish democracy still has to solve. Democracy means respect for compromise and law, and the hiding of what happened under Franco laws, just as the due obedience laws and end point laws or amnesty laws in Latin America, show a democratic deficit in a society where silence violates even more the rights of the victims.

The creation of a commission for the recovery of historical memory implies a chance to put an end to the silence of the Franco period that is torturing a society that voluntarily preferred to look somewhere else, and forget that in Spain – just like in Chile or Argentina– genocide also existed.

One of the goals of this Meeting is to analyse how genocides were confronted in Latin America countries and in Spain, not just from the point of view of the social movements created not to forget what happened, but also what was the institutional answer and the solution proposed by the legal system.

In Spain, the legal public debate has been very shy, Courts have used two arguments to reject the revision of the decisions of the public powers during the dictatorship: the non-retroactivity of the 1978 Constitution and legal security, but they have forgotten the non-expiration of Human Rights, and all the more so when they have been violated by an unlawful regime, arisen thanks to the strength of the arms and not the will of people. This regime was condemned several times by the UN both in the Postdam and San Francisco Conferences and in several Resolutions; therefore, the recovery of Historical Memory and the compensation of the victims of the Franco Repression during and after the non-civil war is a pending subject for Spanish Courts, more and more demanded by the Spanish society.

And to carry it out, we count with the invaluable collaboration of international and national experts in this matter, from jurists to journalists, defenders of Human Rights in NGO’s… We hope the opinions and conclusions of this Meeting will be useful for all the people struggling for peace and justice.

Barcelona, 20th of March 2005.