The ironies of justice

At long last a Spanish court has been able to hear testimony that corroborates the work of historians and researchers: General Francisco Franco and his fellow plotters who overthrew the Republic in 1936 carried out the systematic extermination of their political opponents during the civil war and the first years of the military dictatorship that lasted until 1975.

This is one of the unexpected outcomes of the trial being held in the Supreme Court of former magistrate Baltasar Garzón for overstepping his authority by launching an investigation in 2008 into crimes against humanity committed during the Franco era.

The charges against Garzón were brought by an extremist right wing group trying to block his efforts to give a voice to some of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Franco regime: they have failed, and for the first time those voices are being heard in a court of law.

Because the men and women, many of them in their eighties and nineties, who over the last few weeks have been recalling the terrible events of those far away days are victims: as young children they were orphaned when mothers and fathers were taken away from them to be murdered and dumped in mass graves.

At last they have been able to tell their story, and in so doing ask that the state help them recover the bodies of their loved ones, certify their deaths, and the cause of death, and lay them to rest in a proper grave.

Beyond their emotional impact, these testimonies will have helped others come to terms with the past, and will have made a contribution to a process of reclaiming the memory of Franco's victims, but a process that will not be complete until the state meets its obligations and until the scandal of a judge who sought a judicial solution to their tragedy but who found himself in the dock for his pains is over.

Garzón has made it clear that he applied national and international laws to put together a case based on human rights legislation that would allow for the demands of families whose loved ones were murdered and dumped in mass graves by Franco to be heard. His interpretation of the rules was no different to that of Supreme Court Justice Luciano Varela in his efforts to make sure that the complaint brought against Garzón went forward.

Meanwhile, three of the seven magistrates in the tribunal, including the prosecutor, say that the charges against Garzón should be dropped. But it does not seem to have occurred to anybody that the charges themselves are in contempt of court. Because another paradox of this trial is that the investigation he began into the crimes of the Franco era remains open. The High Court did not annul it, passing on to provincial courts responsibility for opening mass graves.

The matter of Garzón's competency in pursuing the case also remains open, awaiting a decision by the justices judging him. It surely would have made more sense to have done that before bringing him to trial. But the biggest paradox of all in this affair is that his investigation into the crimes of the Franco era has not reopened old wounds, as those who brought the charges against him claimed, but instead has paved the way toward healing them.