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MONTEVIDEO — Uruguay's Supreme Court on Monday declared unconstitutional a law that has provided amnesty to military officials accused of murders, disappearances and other human rights violations during the country's dictatorship.
Ruling in the case of a young communist detained and slain by the military in 1974, the justices said the amnesty law violates Uruguay's separation of powers and failed to pass by a required supermajority — arguments sure to be made in other dirty war prosecutions.
The law remains on the books, but the ruling could swing voters in favor of overturning it altogether in a plebiscite being held Sunday along with presidential elections. Until now, polls have shown the plebiscite failing.
Former vice president and constitutional scholar Gonzalo Aguirre told The Associated Press that the ruling "supports the conviction that on Sunday the law should be annulled by popular vote and that this will lead to the reopening of dozens of cases that could not be prosecuted because of the amnesty."
Court spokesman Raul Oxandabarat said he can't release details of the 4-1 ruling because it hasn't yet been delivered to all the parties in the case.
But attorney Jose Errandonea, who represents the family of the slain militant Nibia Sabalsagaray, told the AP that "the ruling is so convincing in its fundamentals, and while each case is unique, it's understood that this sets a precedent, and that the Supreme Court won't change if presented with a similar case,"
Amnesties for human rights violators were key to enabling democracies to emerge from the dictatorship era in South America, but they have been increasingly challenged recently.
Uruguay's law granting amnesty to military figures in the 1973-1985 dictatorship was passed by a congressional majority in 1986 and reaffirmed in 1989 with 54 percent of the vote in a plebiscite. It was seen initially as a balancing response to a 1985 law granting amnesty to leftist guerrillas accused of attacks.
And if voters decide to annul the law, the statute of limitations defense also will disappear, exposing many other figures from the military dictatorship to prosecution, criminal lawyer Oscar Lopez Goldaracena, an expert in human rights law, told the AP.
The amnesty has applied only to crimes committed in Uruguay, and the government has prosecuted a small number of retired military figures accused of rights violations in other countries as part of Operation Condor, a joint campaign by military regimes to stamp out leftist movements in the Southern Cone.
Former president-cum-dictator Juan M. Bordaberry is under preventive detention in one such case involving the murders of four Uruguayans in Argentina.
Prosecutor Mirtha Guianze, who brought the case to the high court, praised the ruling for "showing that we have a totally independent Supreme Court." She recalled that the last vote, in 1989, came at a much different time for Uruguay, when the country was still emerging from its dictatorship.
In the Sabalsagaray case, five or six military figures testified as witnesses, safe from prosecution. "Now they can be called back to testify as suspects," she said.
Brazil and Chile still have dictatorship-era amnesty laws in force, while Argentina has annulled them.
Chile's covers crimes committed between 1973 and 1978 under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and the ruling party has never had enough political support to annul it, despite the pleas of victims' families. Meanwhile, some 700 other military figures prosecuted for violations outside the law want it to cover them as well.
In Brazil, the law was initially celebrated by enemies of the dictatorship because it enabled exiles to return home. But since then it has been a sore point, seen as granting impunity to rights violators.
Argentina's Congress, like Uruguay's, passed an amnesty in 1986 and 1987, when the fragile democracy led by President Raul Alfonsin was under tremendous pressure from the military. President Carlos Menem later absolved top military leaders, citing the same law. Congress and the court later annulled the amnesties, and President Cristina Fernandez has supported dirty war prosecutions.
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Associated Press writers Mayra Pertossi in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Eva Vergara in Santiago, Chile, and Marco Sibaja in Brasilia, Brazil, contributed to this report.
