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Guatemala Genocide Case. Judgment No. STC 237/2005

In December 1999, Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchii and others brought a complaint in Spanish courts alleging genocide, torture, terrorism, summary execution, and unlawful detention perpetrated against Guatemala's Mayan indigenous people and their supporters during the 1970s and 1980s. The suspects included five generals, two police chiefs, and a colonel—a group that included former presidents and defense and interior ministers. Although the investigating magistrate initially accepted the complaint, upper courts held it inadmissible. On Septembet 26,2005, in its judgment on the Guatemala Genocide case, Spain's Constitutional Tribunal reversed, reinstating the complaint in its entirety and issuing a ringing endorsement of broad universal j urisdiction. The Tribunal found that no nexus or tie to Spain—not the presence of the defendant, the nationality of the victims, or Spanish national interest—was needed to initiate a complaint. It also rejected that idea that in order to proceed, complainants needed to show that trial in the territorial state was not possible. In so doing, the Constitutional Tribunal reestablished Spain as one of the world's most welcoming forums for cases based on universal jurisdiction over certain international crimes, and weighed in on some of the knottiest questions regarding the exercise of universal jurisdiction. The complainants' genocide charges, filed with the Audiencia Nacional, included both the targeting of Mayans as an ethnic group and the intended elimination of a part of the Gautemalan "national" group due to its perceived ideology—a gloss on the definition of genocide that the Audiencia had accepted in earlier cases involving Chilean and Argentine defendants. The complainants grounded Spanish jurisdiction on Article 23.4 of the Organic Law of the Judicial Branch (LOPD). That provision, enacted in 1985, allows for prosecution of certain crimes committed by non-Spaniards outside Spain, including genocide, terrorism, and other crimes recognized in international treaties ratified by Spain. On March 27, 2000, Audiencia Judge Guillermo Ruiz Polanco accepted the Guatemalan complaint and agreed to open an