opinion

The Inter-American Human Rights Court and the Portugal case

by Miguel Antonio Bernal

This past September 12 the Inter-American Human Rights Court (CIDH, by its Spanish initials), whose decisions the Panamanian state is obliged to obey, passed a sentence condemning the violation of human rights in the Heliodoro Portugal case. The prohibition against committing crimes against humanity is of the “ius cogens” category of norms, and the punishment of such crimes is obligatory under international law.

I would like to remind you that Heliodoro Portugal, like more than 100 compatriots who fell victim to the opprobrious dictatorship that began on October 11, 1968, was disappeared by Panamanian government agents in 1970. At the end of the 90s, there appeared a body buried at the Los Pumas military barracks in Tocumen. Thanks to the investigative journalism of Rafael Pérez Jaramillo and the financial support of Ramón Fonseca Mora, it became possible to do a DNA test that identified the remains as those of Portugal. It was this that then obliged the Attorney General at the time to reopen the case.

For nothing were all the sophistries by which the public “servants,” under the color of governmental authority, tried to perpetuate impunity, for example by arguing that the court couldn’t hear the case because Portugal was executed in 1970 but Panama only accepted the court’s jurisdiction in 1990. The court didn’t allow itself to be held back by an inquiry into whether at the moment of the crime there was or was not jurisdiction to intervene, but instead dismissed these sorts of arguments by analyzing the origins of the proclamations banning crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg Principles and other sources.

The CIDH’s sentence confirms that the forced disappearance of Heliodoro Portugal violated the human rights of life, of personal freedom, of personal integrity, of due process of law and other fundamental freedoms. It also pointed out that the Panamanian government had not complied with its obligation to proscribe the crimes of forced disappearance and torture, as was agreed in Inter-American treaties.

The content of the historic judgment by the CIDH shows us, once again, that “crimes against humanity produce the violation of a series of inalienable rights recognized in the Inter-American Convention, which must not be left unpunished;” and that “the government has the duty to avoid and combat impunity.” That is, that there was a combined lack of investigation, prosecution, capture, trial and conviction of those responsible for the violation of rights protected by the Inter-American Convention.

Those of us who believe that the crimes committed during the Torrijos and Noriega dictatorships can’t be left unpunished find in the CIDH sentence that condemned the government for crimes against humanity renewed hope in the face of the denial of justice with which Panamanian society has lived for some four decades.