Chile | Lecture and discussion

Lecture and discussion on „The fight against impunity for crimes against humanity in Chile“ with Dr Juan Garcés (lawyer, board member of the Fundación Presidente Allende, Madrid)

Dr Juan Garcés is a Spanish jurist, lawyer, legal, political and economic scholar (Sciences-Po Paris y Sorbonne; Universidad Complutense de Madrid), who became the closest personal advisor to President Salvador Allende and survived the military attack on the Chilean presidential residence in 1973, which ushered in the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Among other things, Garcés was responsible for the indictment of General Pinochet for torture and conspiracy, which led to his arrest in England in 1998 and was an important impetus for leading and institutionalising the fight against impunity worldwide. He represented the families of Chilean Detenidos y Desaparecidos (detained and disappeared) in court. In 1999, he was honoured with the Right Livelihood Award for his efforts to bring Pinochet to justice. In 2004, Garcés successfully sued the Riggs Bank, with whose support Pinochet had taken 10 million US dollars from Chilean state property out of the country and which Garcés distributed to the victims of torture and the families of those murdered and „disappeared“ during the dictatorship.

The lawyer pushed forward the case of the Spanish dictator Franco with the same energy, thereby initiating the social reappraisal of the Franco era in Spain, for which there is still a lot of headwind. Garcés has researched, taught and lectured at universities in France, England, the USA, Spain, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and other countries. In October 1972, he gave a joint lecture in Bonn with Günter Grass, who was present in the Swedish parliament when Garcés was awarded the Alternative Nobel Prize in 1999.

Welcome: Presidium of the Bochum Regional Court; State Secretary Dr Daniela Brückner; Knut Rauchfuss (Medizinische Flüchtlingshilfe/ MFH, Bochum); PD Dr Irmtrud Wojak (Fritz Bauer Forum, Bochum)

A joint event with the Bochum District Court and in the series of the Bochum Alliance „Solidarity and Remembrance“.