Uruguay takes a step backwards on Human Rights

On Friday February 22, the Uruguayan Supreme Court put a stop to human rights trials stemming from that country's military dictatorship during the 1970s and 80s by calling a law that had turned over a 1986 amnesty unconstitutional.

The amnesty, passed by popular referendum in the years following Uruguay's return to democracy, was overturned in late 2011. The law, passed following an Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling that declared Uruguay's amnesty in conflict with the country's treaty obligations, eliminated the statute of limitations on cases against former military and police officials alleged to be responsible for disappearances and other atrocities under the dictatorship.

However, the Supreme Court found this week that the 2011 law, passed by the president Jose Mujica's Broad Front (Frente Amplio) following several unsuccessful attempts to reverse the amnesty by referendum, to be unconstitutional. The finding, while not entirely unexpected, was widely denounced by human rights activists in Uruguay and beyond. President Mujica's party released a statement on its website denouncing the finding as an "obstacle in the search for truth and justice legitimately claimed by social organizations and victims of state sponsored terrorism."

Opponents of the decision vowed to take the fight against the amnesty law to the Inter-American Court, and to take legal action against the Supreme Court itself.

The finding affects dozens of cases brought by families and survivors of the military regime, which is believed to have disappeared around 200 individuals and tortured thousands more. While the scale of the violence that shook Uruguay during the Cold War seems perhaps less horrific than say, that of Peru or Guatemala (where nearly 70,000 and 200,000 individuals were killed, respectively, and countless more tortured, raped, beaten, etc.), the issue is highly divisive after 20 years of democracy in this country of just over three million. The finding is unlikely to be the last word on trials for abuses though, and human rights activists could find that the ruling only galvanizes their movement, providing the impetus to overturn the amnesty by other, constitutional means.