Anna Colvin, Universal Jurisdiction as a Workaround to Domestic Amnesty: An Analysis of the Argentine Case Brought by Spanish Franco-Era Victims, 42 Wis. Int'l L. J. 41 (2024).
Enacting an amnesty law requires striking a difficult and consequential balance. On the one hand, the laws are often necessary to facilitate a country’s transition to democracy. But, during that transition and for the years that follow, those same laws prevent victims of human rights abuses from seeing their abusers held accountable. This balancing act has played out in Spain over the past fifty years. The 1977 Amnesty Act grants immunity to General Francisco Franco and his administration for human rights abuses they committed. Legally prevented from seeking justice in Spain, victims and their attorneys traveled to Argentina to file suit in 2010. Victims asked Argentina to use the international law doctrine of universal jurisdiction—a legal principle that permits extraterritorial countries to exercise jurisdiction over an accused person regardless of where the crime was committed, provided that the alleged crime is sufficiently serious to pose a serious threat to the entire international community—to investigate and prosecute these abuses. This Comment explores the facts of that lawsuit: its achievements, challenges, and overall prognosis. It argues that Spain’s lack of cooperation with the lawsuit presents challenges for the lawsuit’s efficacy in seeing through criminal prosecutions of Franco-era leaders. But it acknowledges that the lawsuit has nonetheless spurred a shift in policy regarding amnesty on a domestic level in Spain, which, through its own legislative acts and judicial decision-making, is better able to respond to the remedial measures sought by Franco-era victims than an extraterritorial court like Argentina.
