The\u00a0project of human rights and its enforcement through\u00a0particular states and\/or international criminal courts\u00a0rests on claims of universal jurisdiction in the effort to protect individuals and peoples from gross violations of human dignity. From the Nuremberg trials to the Guatemalan civil war, crimes against humanity such as torture, war crimes, terrorism, and genocide have been the target of universally\u00a0enforceable laws.\u00a0In the last fifty years, Spain\u00a0has emerged as one of the major European\u00a0states\u00a0supporting this\u00a0project with its most high-profile case\u00a0being the\u00a0indictment and trial of\u00a0ex-Chilean president and general, Augusto Pinochet.<\/p>\n
On May 31st, 2011, judge Eloy Velasco of the Audencia Nacional\u00a0<\/em> in Spain issued an order to process twenty Salvadoran soldiers (two of whom were defense ministers)\u00a0for the terrorist assassinations of six Jesuit priests, a housekeeper and her fifteen year old daughter. Among those murdered\u00a0at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA)\u00a0during the civil war of El Salvador in 1989 was Ignacio Ellacur\u00eda, the Spanish liberation theologian and president of\u00a0UCA who was\u00a0deeply inspired by the\u00a0life of the\u00a0martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero. The social concerns of Ellacur\u00eda, the priests,\u00a0and the university at large were targeted because of their attempted negotiations between the government and leftist groups.<\/p>\n Although Spain’s use of the universal jurisdiction claim is rare, it has strong precedent in the nation’s long history. For better\u00a0or for worse, it\u00a0remains a\u00a0legacy of Spanish legal tradition. Cases of humanitarian intervention in defending innocent civilians among foreign peoples were among those cited by Franscisco de Vitoria as falling under the jursidiction of the law of nations (ius gentium<\/em>). Imperial Spain also employed universal jurisdiction\u00a0through papal authority, which conceded the Spanish monarchs the\u00a0territories of infidels in the New World for the purpose of preaching the Gospel.<\/p>\n It remains to be seen whether or not the current case of Ellacur\u00eda will be enforced by the Salvadoran government. According to a Wikileaks source from San Salvador in 2008, opponents to Spain’s exercise of universal jurisdiction come from the political right and left. The opinion at UCA<\/a>, on the other hand, defends Spain’s intervention on the basis of national impunity.\u00a0 Justice, on earth as it is in heaven, is the only thing that can\u00a0satisfy thirsty victims.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The\u00a0project of human rights and its enforcement through\u00a0particular states and\/or international criminal courts\u00a0rests on claims of universal jurisdiction in the effort to protect individuals and peoples from gross violations of human dignity. From the Nuremberg trials to the Guatemalan civil war, crimes against humanity such as torture, war crimes, terrorism, and genocide have been the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":236,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19113],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/schoolofsalamanca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/schoolofsalamanca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/schoolofsalamanca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/schoolofsalamanca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/236"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/schoolofsalamanca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/schoolofsalamanca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":227,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/schoolofsalamanca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions\/227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/schoolofsalamanca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/schoolofsalamanca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/schoolofsalamanca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}