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10 Yale J. Int'l L. 118 (1984-1985)
Dictatorship on Trial: Prosecution of Human Rights Violations in Argentina

handle is hein.journals/yjil10 and id is 126 raw text is: Dictatorship on Trial: Prosecution of Human Rights Violations in Argentina Emilio Fermin Mignonet Cynthia L. Estlundtt Samuel Issacharoffttt Between 1976 and 1983, a military dictatorship ruled Argentina and brought that country into an era of state-directed terror aimed at the civilian population. During that period, a small and vulnerable human rights community, allied with international backers, attempted to stay the hand of the military state and provide a measure of protection for the victims and potential victims of the dictatorship. The struggle was to defend the most elementary of human rights: freedom from arbitrary detention, torture, and summary execution. While the stakes in this struggle were high-life or death for thousands of individuals-it was nonetheless an unfortunately familiar effort to define the limits of what a state may inflict on its citizens. With the election of a civilian government in October 1983, however, this battle moved onto the unfamiliar ground of setting an affirmative agenda for the trial and punishment of those responsible for acts of state terror. With little guidance from Argentine history or the experience of other countries in the transition from military to civilian rule, and with the constant rumblings of future military uprisings as a backdrop, the restored civilian political and legal institutions turned to the issue that would dominate the first year of civilian rule: the prosecution of the military. The assumption of power by the civilian authorities did not terminate the impact of the military period on the fledgling government. The pecu- liar method of repression perfected by the Argentine military-disap- pearance without a trace into a parallel, extralegal police and military network-left behind tens of thousands of family members and friends of t Director, Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) (Center for Legal and Social Studies), Buenos Aires, Argentina. ft Attorney, Sugarman & Hellegers, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ttt Attorney, Kirschner, Walters, Willig, Weinberg & Dempsey, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ms. Estlund and Mr. Issacharoff represented the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights in Argentina in 1984 through a grant from the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation.

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