Baltasar Garzón

Baltasar Garzón (born October 26, 1955, Torres, Spain) is a Spanish judge famous for his high-profile investigations into crimes against humanity.

Garzón, the second of five children in a middle-class family, grew up in Andalusia in southern Spain. Raised a Roman Catholic, he attended a seminary for several years before abandoning religious studies and turning his focus toward law. After earning a law degree from the University of Sevilla in 1979, he began his judicial career at a local court in Huelva provincia (province) in 1981. In 1983 he became a magistrate. He served on a court in Almería provincia until 1988, when he joined the Fifth Central Court of Investigation, a branch of the National Court (Audiencia Nacional) in Madrid.

As a judge-magistrate for the National Court, Garzón was responsible for investigating cases involving drug trafficking and terrorism. By the early 1990s he had successfully prosecuted members of the Antiterrorist Liberation Groups (Grupos Antiteroristas de Liberación; GAL)—an illegal paramilitary organization that opposed the Basque separatist group ETA—for the murders of a number of suspected ETA members. In 1993 Garzón won a seat in Spain’s Congress of Deputies, where he represented the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. He resigned the following year, however, after falling out with Prime Minister Felipe González Márquez. Garzón’s continued investigation into the government’s alleged support of GAL in the 1980s contributed to the downfall of the González government in 1996.

Garzón entered the international spotlight when in 1998 he sought the extradition to Spain of Augusto Pinochet in order to try the former Chilean dictator for human rights abuses. Garzón was acting under the controversial legal principle of universal jurisdiction, whereby courts in one country may judge grave human rights crimes committed outside that country, regardless of the nationality of the accused. He later invoked universal jurisdiction in several other high-profile cases, including the indictments of several former Argentine officials, for human rights violations during Argentina’s Dirty War (1976–83); Osama bin Laden, for his role in the September 11 attacks of 2001; and a number of former members of the George W. Bush administration (2001–09), for allegedly allowing torture at the United States’ Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Garzón’s limited success in some of these cases garnered the plaudits of human rights activists, but many critics felt that he had overreached his authority. In 2009 Spain restricted the application of universal jurisdiction to cases involving Spanish interests. Nevertheless, Garzón remained unapologetic about his activism. Citing as an inspiration the Sicilian prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, a crusader against organized crime who was assassinated by the Mafia in 1992, Garzón described his work as an effort to uphold the rule of law, both within Spain and internationally.

Meanwhile, Garzón continued to work on various domestic cases. He played an important role in Spain’s crackdown on ETA, and in 2008 he opened an investigation into the disappearance of more than 100,000 people during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and the subsequent Francisco Franco regime. However, he was soon charged with breaching a 1977 amnesty law that had pardoned all perpetrators of politically motivated crimes during the Franco era. Although Garzón stepped down from the case, he was suspended from his position with the National Court in 2010, and he later appeared before the Spanish Supreme Court. In addition to the alleged violation of the 1977 amnesty law, he faced charges involving other cases, and in 2012 he was convicted for ordering the illegal wiretapping of conversations between defense attorneys and their clients; Garzón claimed that he had been attempting to prove that the lawyers were involved in money laundering. The court disbarred him for 11 years.