“The Supreme Court has spared itself further embarrassment by rejecting these ill-advised charges,” Reed Brody, a spokesman for the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said after Monday’s verdict.
“Investigating torture and ‘disappearances’ cannot be considered a crime.
But the damage has already been done with the previous conviction of Garzon,”the spokesman added.
A group of UN experts including Gabriela Knaul, UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, had also voiced concern about the trial,
Garzon was accused of abuse of power for trying to investigate the disappearance of some 114,000 people during the 1936-39 Civil War and General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship that ended in 1975.
Garzon had argued that the atrocities were crimes against humanity and not subject to a 1977 amnesty voted through by parliament
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