His 1994 investigation led to the conviction of José Barrionuevo Peña, a former Interior minister, as head of the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (GAL), a state terrorist group, in the aftermath of the kidnapping of French citizen Segundo Marey.
The judge stated that "EAE-ANV and EHAK (PCTV) were manipulated by the members of the national committee of Batasuna to continue the criminal pursuit designed by ETA".
[12] On 17 October 2008, Garzón formally declared the acts of repression committed by the Franco regime to be crimes against humanity, and accounted them in more than one hundred thousand killings during and after the Spanish Civil War.
The accused asked that the evidence be ruled inadmissible, since it was obtained from conversations between prisoners and counsel, which, under Spanish law, it is claimed, is allowed only in terrorism-related cases.
[16][1] On 10 October 1998, Garzón issued an international warrant for the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for the alleged deaths and torture of Spanish citizens.
The Chilean Truth Commission (1990–91) report was the basis for the warrant, marking an unprecedented use of universal jurisdiction to attempt to try a former dictator for a crime committed abroad.
Eventually it was turned down by British Home Secretary Jack Straw, who rejected Garzón's request to have Pinochet extradited to Spain on health grounds.
[23] In March 2009, Garzón considered whether Spain should allow charges to be filed against former officials from the United States government under George W. Bush for offering justifications for torture.
[26] Similarly, the leaked cable indicates that the Chief Prosecutor intended to also fight this investigation and that he feared, "Garzón may attempt to wring all the publicity he can from the case unless and until he is forced to give it up."
[28] The Supreme Court of Spain has declared admissible three criminal accusations against Garzón for 'prevarication' which implies using his authority as a judge to intentionally subvert the course of justice.
[30] In April 2010, Garzón was indicted by the Spanish Supreme Court for prevarication for arbitrarily changing his juridical criteria to engineer the case in order to bypass the law limiting his jurisdiction.
[30] On 24 April 2010, Garzón presented an appeal to the Supreme Court against the judge investigating the case, Luciano Varela for giving advice to the plaintiffs about the errors in their documents.
On 11 May 2010, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) requested that the Judiciary of Spain might assign Garzón as a consultant to the ICC for six months,[38] which would have allowed General Council of the Judicial Power of Spain (La Comisión Permanente Extraordinaria del Consejo General del Poder Juidicial or CGPJ) to avoid suspending Garzón during the impending trial for investigating crimes committed during the Francisco Franco era.
On Friday, 14 May 2010, Garzón was duly suspended from judicial activity[39] (with pay) 'as a precaution, pending judgment' as a result of the decision of Judge Varela, which causes suspension to be formally required by Spanish law.
The CGPC subsequently declared that it would require five different certificates ('informes' in Spanish) to release Garzón to the ICC as a consultant for six months during his period of suspension from judicial activity.
These were:[40] José Manuel Gómez Begresista, the president of the CGPJ's Commission for Studies and Reports, impugned each of the above five conditions, which he characterized as 'ridiculous' since Garzón had previously been assigned to such work, and no immunity from Spanish law attaches thereto.
[citation needed] Coincidentally, on the same day, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg delivered final judgment in the case Vassili Kononov v. Latvia No.
[43]However, in the prevailing and joint concurring opinion of judges Rozakis, Tulkens, Spielmann and Jebens: the right approach, [...] is that Article 7 of the Convention and the principles it enshrines require that in a rule-of-law system anyone considering carrying out a particular act should be able, by reference to the legal rules defining crimes and the corresponding penalties, to determine whether or not the act in question constitutes a crime and what penalty he or she faces if it is carried out.
The background to this case is that conservative opinion generally asserts that "the dictatorship" is past, and exhuming its less savoury activities is injurious to modern Spanish political interests (as may be Garzón's extraterritorial attempts to accuse foreign nationals of crimes against humanity).
Certainly founding members of the People's Party, such as Manuel Fraga, were members of Franco's government, and there may be a fear that the more aggressively socialist opposition may wish to use these exhumations to imply thereby the intentions of modern Spanish political leaders may be less than entirely democratic, and that established political entities may seek to influence the course of justice (for example – between 2005 and 2010 – when the PP and PSOE denied the Spanish Senate the necessary majority to approve fresh judges for the Constitutional Court of Spain)[45] The allegation is that Garzón dropped (adjourned sine die) a case against the director of Santander, Emilio Botín, in return for sponsorship by the bank of some university courses delivered in New York by Garzón between 2005 and 2006.
On 9 February 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that judge Baltasar Garzón was guilty of illegally ordering the placement of wiretaps in jailhouses to record conversations between inmates and their lawyers in a case of corruption.
[54] Margarita Robles, member of the General Council of the Judiciary and former Subsecretary of State with the socialist government, said that the Supreme Court ruling was "legally impeccable" and had been produced as part of a procedure "with all the guarantees.
[citation needed] At the end of October 2010, the re-election of Judge Juan Saavedra to the Spanish Supreme Court Penal Division reactivated the three judicial processes against Garzón.
The re-appointment of a right-wing judge may have suggested to the Spanish legal authorities that the complaints had sufficient weight to merit continuing the domestic process despite the rulings in the European Court of Human Rights cited above.
[59] In a 2011 book, Garzón wrote that he had at times exceeded the provisions of domestic Spanish legislation, but quoted external sources, including international treaties, to explain his behavior.