Although over the past two decades, several European states, especially the Spanish National Court, have begun to prosecute former heads of state or government from other countries accused of ‘crimes against humanity’, in the existing transitional justice literature, the application of universal jurisdiction on foreign tribunals is hardly discussed as an own legal option of coming to terms with a violent or dictatorial past.
Taking the Pinochet Affair as a starting point, the contribution compares some emblematic cases as consequences of of the so called ‘Pinochet Effect’ (Roht-Arriaza), such as the prosecution of Peruvian Ex-President Alberto Fujimori, who has been extradited from Chile to Peru in 2007 and sentenced there to 25 years of prison, as well as the ongoing arrest warrant against „Africa’s Pinochet“ (Reed Brody), the former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, who in 1999 on a Belgian arrest warrant has been accused of massive human rights violations while no prosecution have been undertaken until today to trial him in Senegal.
While Spain had developed as one of the global leaders using its National Court to try perpetrators of human rights crimes that took place in other parts of the globe, it has not engaged in accountablitiy for the atrocities commited by the Franco regime.
In my paper, I would like to discuss the contradictions surrounding universal jurisdiction as they have evolved since Pinochet's arrest in London fourteen years ago. With the link of the universal jurisdiction principle applied in national courts, my intention is to place the local and context specific processes of dealing with the past in the above mentioned countries in a broader framework by linking domestic to the transnational level and stressing the global diffusion of international legal norms.
The basic question raised therefore is, under which circumstances the application of universal jurisdiction on foreign tribunals has a positive impact on the democratization or process of coping with past human rights violations and what makes it a contested and selective transitional justice-mechanism dependent on asymmetrical international and domestic political power relations.
