Thousands of protesters, led a group of prominent writers, actors, and activists, took to the streets in Madrid this weekend to express their indignation at the persecution of Judge Baltasar Garzón. Meanwhile, an increasing number of judicial and human-rights experts in Spain and elsewhere fear that the three Supreme Court cases against the judge...
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Our friends Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís report: Exactly one year after the release of our film Granito: How To Nail A Dictator at the Sundance Film Festival, the ex-dictator of Guatemala, General Efraín Ríos Montt, was brought up on charges of genocide in a Guatemalan court and placed under house arrest. The culmination...
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Spanish Supreme Court Judge Manuel Marchena, in charge of the third case pending against Garzón, concluded the investigative stage yesterday with a brief charging the Judge with “cohecho impropio,” that is, the appearance of bribery by accepting a gift from an interested party. Marchena has significantly downscaled the original charge of prevarication, or knowingly...
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Ivry sur Seine, a working class municipality on the southern outskirts of Paris, celebrated ten sons of the town who were killed in Spain fighting in the International Brigades yesterday when a plaque in their honor was unveiled. The ceremony was organized by the ACER (Asociation of Friends of Combattants in Republican Spain, for...
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The trial against Garzón "is fueled by domestic political vendettas rather than substantive legal arguments," Dan Kaufman writes in today's New York Times, "and it could dramatically set back international efforts to hold human-rights violators accountable for their crimes."

The Supreme Court’s zeal to try him has little legal basis; rather, it reflects...
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(En castellano.) If there were credit rating agencies devoted to evaluating the moral health of a country’s institutions, yesterday “Spain” would almost certainly have been downgraded to junk-bond status. Its Supreme Court opened the first of three trials against Judge Baltasar Garzón, thus initiating a three-pronged attack on judicial independence and offering...
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"A number of countries around the world have reason to be grateful for the unstinting efforts of a Spanish judge who finds himself on trial," The Guardian editorializes today,

Judge Baltasar Garzón's 1998 attempt to extradite General Pinochet from Britain to face charges of human rights abuses relating to the 1973 coup in Read more »

Judge Garzón's first trial before Spain's Supreme Court has started. Garzón is accused of knowingly going against the law ("prevarication") when ordering allegedly illegal wiretaps while investigating a corruption ring involving the regional leadership of the conservative--and now governing--Partido Popular. The trial, which is expected to last three days, involves seven magistrates from the...
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The international media are gearing up for the upcoming two trials of Judge Baltasar Garzón. "Is it Crash and Burn Time?" Daniel Woolls asks, writing for the Associated Press:

On Tuesday, Garzon goes on trial for allegedly ordering illegal jailhouse wiretaps in a domestic corruption probe. A week later he appears in...
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