Garzón against terrorism?
Last week, the Spanish judge Baltazar Garzón spoke at Harvard Law School. Garzón is famous throughout the world for his aggressive use of Spain’s 1985 law granting jurisdiction over any crimes against humanity that can be linked to Spain. In 1998, his indictment of Pinochet got the former dictator briefly arrested in London.
In the hours before his talk, I’d run from bookstore to bookstore, looking for a book by or about Garzón that I might ask him to autograph. No luck. The Harvard undergrad Spanish major in the international bookstore was so confident her store had nothing by any Garzón that she refused to look him up in the database. “Who is he?” she asked.
Maybe six JD students came to the talk. Thankfully, somebody had thought to advertise the event outside the law school, and the room was packed with older people, including 12 federal judges attending a conference with Garzón.
But the real surprise for me was not the lack of interest of the Harvard Community, which I am used to by now, but rather the subject matter of Garzón’s talk. The judge, known for his defiance of the U.S. and for his consideration of indictments against Kissinger and Bush II, spent an hour and a half speaking out against terrorism. At times he sounded almost like an eloquent, Spanish-speaking member of the Bush administration.
Garzón called for more extensive anti-terrorist cooperation. Information sharing should be more extensive between security agencies in individual countries, he said, and the information needs to travel rapidly across borders. He spoke of how he’d once detained a man he later learned was a prime September 11 suspect, but at the time had not been able to get sufficient information to hold him. And of how the U.S. had long been reluctant to call the E.T.A. a terrorist organization.
I don’t really know what to make of the talk. Was Garzón trying to build rapport with a U.S. audience by emphasizing ideas his listeners would be likely to share? Was he reacting to the March 11 attacks in his country? Or has fighting terrorism always been the primary mission of Garzón, just not the one that gets his name into the news?
In the hours before his talk, I’d run from bookstore to bookstore, looking for a book by or about Garzón that I might ask him to autograph. No luck. The Harvard undergrad Spanish major in the international bookstore was so confident her store had nothing by any Garzón that she refused to look him up in the database. “Who is he?” she asked.
Maybe six JD students came to the talk. Thankfully, somebody had thought to advertise the event outside the law school, and the room was packed with older people, including 12 federal judges attending a conference with Garzón.
But the real surprise for me was not the lack of interest of the Harvard Community, which I am used to by now, but rather the subject matter of Garzón’s talk. The judge, known for his defiance of the U.S. and for his consideration of indictments against Kissinger and Bush II, spent an hour and a half speaking out against terrorism. At times he sounded almost like an eloquent, Spanish-speaking member of the Bush administration.
Garzón called for more extensive anti-terrorist cooperation. Information sharing should be more extensive between security agencies in individual countries, he said, and the information needs to travel rapidly across borders. He spoke of how he’d once detained a man he later learned was a prime September 11 suspect, but at the time had not been able to get sufficient information to hold him. And of how the U.S. had long been reluctant to call the E.T.A. a terrorist organization.
I don’t really know what to make of the talk. Was Garzón trying to build rapport with a U.S. audience by emphasizing ideas his listeners would be likely to share? Was he reacting to the March 11 attacks in his country? Or has fighting terrorism always been the primary mission of Garzón, just not the one that gets his name into the news?