Security & Strategic Review November 2007 (ISSN 1741-4202)

CHILE | Confusion over rulings in rights trials. On 13 November the second penal panel of the supreme court threw out all charges against retired army Colonel Claudio Lecaros Carrasco, who had been sentenced by an appeals court to a five-year prison term for the kidnap and murder, in 1973, of three peasants - offences which had been classified as crimes against humanity. This caused an uproar among human rights organisations. A group of lawyers including Boris Paredes, who serves in the interior ministry's human rights programme, has announced that they will be filing a suit against the ruling before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The court ruled by a narrow majority that the charges against Colonel Lecaros had prescribed. The decision was mainly based on the argument that that the killings evidently took place on 17 September 1973 and therefore, even if the bodies were still missing, this could not be considered a continuing kidnapping, for which statutory limitations do not apply.

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