Spain's Judge Baltasar Garzon, the most prominent investigative magistrate in the country is opening up a case against former Bush administration officials for the system that they created resulting in torture that was "systematic and ordered at high levels of the US government." Read the article here.
This story is all the more intersting because Spain's court system has already used this "principle of universal justice" in an internationally high profile case against human rights abuses: that against the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. And it was the same Baltasar Garzon who brought the case!
Although Pinochet died before he was convicted of his crimes his case was (in the words of wikipedia) "the first time that several European judges applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, declaring themselves competent to judge crimes committed by former head of states, despite local amnesty laws."
Quite interesting. We will see where this goes.
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