Once a high-flyer, Spain’s super judge stares into abyss amid charges of abuse of authority

Spain’s super judge falls from grace

MADRID — As a young man Baltasar Garzon pumped gas to work his way through law school. Decades later, as a crusading judge, he went after the likes of Augusto Pinochet and Osama bin Laden.

Now, Garzon’s meteoric rise is being eclipsed by an equally spectacular fall from grace.

It’s a reversal of fortune that could remove one of the world’s leading advocates of universal jurisdiction — the idea that some crimes are so egregious they can be prosecuted anywhere.

Spain’s Eliot Ness is staring deep into the abyss as he awaits a potentially career-ending trial on charges of knowingly overstepping the bounds of his authority in a probe of Spanish civil war atrocities covered by an amnesty.

Garzon has other cases against him pending, and he reported to the Supreme Court Monday to testify in one of them, involving jailhouse wiretaps he ordered in a corruption probe.

For many in Spain, the saga goes beyond the issue of whether he has erred or not: They say the 54-year-old Garzon, who sports a slicked-back silvery mane, is being punished for his status as a celebrity — a jet-hopping, workaholic sleuth who loves being in the headlines.

Critics say he has a mixed record winning convictions, cuts procedural corners, and that he’s less interested in promoting justice than in promoting Baltasar Garzon.

Many see a simple explanation: colleagues in the Spanish judiciary are simply fed up with the man.

“It comes as no surprise that his colleagues, some conservative and others socialist, are dying to give him a kick in the butt,” said Florentino Portero, a professor of history at Spain’s National Open University. “Judges do not like stardom.”

After years of pursuing villains outside Spain’s borders, Garzon was indicted last month in connection with arguably his country’s biggest unfinished case: the execution or disappearance of more than 100,000 civilians at the hands of supporters of Gen. Francisco Franco.

If convicted, Garzon does not face jail time but could be removed from the bench for up to 20 years.

Until Garzon acted, there had never been an official probe of that dark chapter of Spanish history. Some say his problems are retribution for breaking that taboo.

But Garzon’s woes do not end there.

He’s under formal investigation in two other cases: the one for allegedly ordering jailhouse wiretaps in a domestic corruption probe when such eavesdropping is limited to terrorism cases, and another involving Banco Santander’s sponsorship of human rights seminars that Garzon organized while on sabbatical in New York in 2005 and 2006. After returning to Spain, Garzon threw out a tax fraud complaint filed against the bank’s chairman and other executives.

Jose Maria Mena, former chief prosecutor in the Catalonia region, said complaints are filed against judges all the time, but for three separate ones to target a single magistrate at once is highly unusual. “It is a coincidence that raises suspicion,” Mena said.

He likened Spanish judges to a clique inside a cocoon and acting like rival novelists. “Among them there are also strange jealousies, differences and competitiveness,” he said.

Garzon shot to fame after having Pinochet arrested while the aging former despot was visiting London in 1998, and trying in vain to have him extradited to Spain for trial over torture and other abuses committed during his dictatorship in Chile.

Through this and other cases — Garzon indicted bin Laden in 2003 and Spanish colleagues took on cases involving abuses in such faraway places as Tibet and Rwanda — Garzon’s name became synonymous with the concept of universal jurisdiction.

But after receiving complaints from countries targeted in such Spanish probes, such as Israel, Spain changed its law last year so that these cases now require a clear link to Spain, such as Spanish victims.

If Garzon is convicted in the case involving the civil war probe, it would effectively end his career as a judge and deal another blow to Spain’s role as an advocate of universal jurisdiction.

“Thanks to Garzon, Spain became a symbol of justice for atrocity victims around the world. Now justice itself may be the victim in Spain,” Reed Brody, a spokesman for Human Rights Watch, wrote last month.

Garzon launched his civil war probe in the summer of 2008, ordering mass graves dug up and telling government agencies to pore over archives in search of information on missing people.

Months later he bowed out in a dispute over jurisdiction, but did so reluctantly and not before declaring that the Franco regime should be charged with crimes against humanity.

Garzon cited a systematic campaign by Franco to wipe out opponents. The Republican, or government, side in the war also committed atrocities, but these deaths of pro-Franco civilians got a proper accounting by the regime, Garzon argued.

Garzon transferred the affair to provincial courts, and the case appeared to come to a halt. Prosecutors, who had argued he lacked jurisdiction, made no move against Garzon for having undertaken the investigation.

But a small, far right-wing group, Manos Limpias, which calls itself a labor union, did. It filed a complaint against Garzon alleging he started the probe even though he knew civil war atrocities were covered by an amnesty passed by the Spanish Parliament in 1977, two years after Franco died, as the country was trying to heal and looking to rebuild from the ruins of the war.

Last year the Spanish Supreme Court agreed to study the complaint, even though prosecutors with the court said they saw no evidence Garzon committed a crime. An investigating magistrate at the court, Luciano Varela, indicted Garzon last month, setting the stage for a trial in coming months.

And that has bolstered claims Garzon has enemies at both ends of the political spectrum: Varela is not a Franco admirer but a leftist who helped found an association of progressive judges and was reportedly known by colleagues early in his career as “the guerrilla”.

Garzon denies wrongdoing, insisting his probe was legitimate. Among other things, he argues that cases of missing persons are legal rarities that cannot be covered by an amnesty, because no bodies have been found and thus the crime is an ongoing one.

Despite the widespread impression that Garzon is being slapped down for being a star, others see a clear political component: they say conservatives in the Supreme Court, elsewhere in the judiciary and in Spanish society just do not want to revisit the civil war.

Jose Antonio Martin Pallin, a judge emeritus at the Supreme Court, says it is debatable whether Garzon acted properly in launching the probe but under no circumstances should he be charged with a crime.

Former prosecutor Mena put it this way: Garzon “put his hand on an electrical cable that had not been disconnected, 70 years later, and he got a big shock.”