Srdja Trifkovic, The Super Judge

Enter Baltasar Garzón, prosecuting magistrate of Chamber 5 of Spain’s national criminal court. He has, not only by Anglo-Saxon standards, unprecedented authority to initiate investigations, to jail or bail suspects, and to decide whether to bring charges.

The media-savvy “Superjuez” first attracted limelight in October 1998, when he sent to London a warrant for the arrest of visiting former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet over the alleged deaths of Spanish citizens during his rule. Garzon’s claim to de facto universal jurisdiction was breathtakingly audacious. Eventually his request was turned down by British Home Secretary Jack Straw, not because Pinochet enjoyed diplomatic immunity—which he did—but on far feebler grounds of his poor health.

In subsequent years Garzon has tried to lay his hands on former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger (in connection with the U.S. support of Latin American death squads in the early 1970s), on Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi (for tax evasion), on unspecified U.S. government officials (for alleged abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib), and on 98 leaders of the 1976-1983 Argentine military junta. Only one lower-ranking officer, Adolfo Scilingo, had the bad luck to be extradited—from Mexico—on Garzon’s “Dirty War” warrant. He was sentenced to a thousand years in jail, reduced on appeal to 640.

Garzon’s behavior has grown increasingly erratic of late. Last October he declared the acts of repression by General Franco during and immediately after the Civil War (1936-39) to be “crimes against humanity,” which he would start prosecuting. A month later, however, Garzon sullenly announced that he was dropping the case against Franco and his close aides, after his colleagues finally questioned his jurisdiction over acts committed 70 years ago by people who are all dead and whose alleged crimes were covered by the 1977 general amnesty.
Garzon’s showmanship would be merely irritating, in the manner of other self-promoting Euro-leftists—Bernard Kouchner, say—were it not for the fact that he uses self-appropriated powers to destroy the lives and reputations of his less well known targets.

Take the case of Gennady Petrov, a Russian millionaire resident in Spain who was arrested last June on Garzon’s odrers on the suspicion of money laundering and organized crime connections. Following a spectacular military-style invasion of his villa in Mallorca, Petrov, his wife and their 10-year old daughter were kept naked at gunpoint for hours in their bedroom while the search was going on. Garzon used a Franco-era law to keep Petrov and other suspects arrested under the same warrant incommunicado for months on end, deprived of bail or legal assistance, while the investigation was proceeding in inquisitorial secrecy. The defense continues to be denied access to the evidence that prompted Garzon to act, in direct violation of the standards set by the European Court in Strasburg. Spain, being a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights, is obliged to observe the rulings of the Court, but Garzon appears to give precedence to his country’s legislation when it suits his purposes—even if it was enacted by bête noir Francisco Franco.

Last October Garzon went a step further when he ordered the Guardia Civil to raid the Spanish villa of Petrov’s alleged associate Vladislav Reznik, a deputy of United Russia party and chairman of the State Duma Financial Markets Committee. The seizure of valuable property (including artwork) was a case of deja-vu. Garzon’s subsequent attempt to get hold of Reznik, who was not in Spain at the time of the raid, was different—although by no means new: it reflected his customary dislike of established international legal rules. Garzon tried to issue a summons through the office of Reznik’s Spanish lawyer, in disregard of proper channels that exist under the legal assistance agreement between Spain and the Russian Federation.
This latest attempt by Garzon to exert universal jurisdiction over a foreign national, in violation of international legal norms and in disregard of the would-be defendant’s immunity in his own country of citizenship, indicates that the “Superjudge” primarily wants to create a scene. His real target was not Reznik, but the principle of sovereignty and national independence itself.