Pinochet Victims Of His Rule Essay, Research Paper
PINOCHET: THE CHILD VICTIMS OF HIS RULE
As the House of Lords considers legal arguments that Augusto Pinochet is immune from prosecution, Amnesty International UK today released details of some of the 80 children under 16-years-old killed or “disappeared” by Chilean security forces during his rule.
In the new report Chile: The Child Victims, Amnesty International gives details of how children as young as two were amongst the thousands of victims of Pinochet’s rule. The evidence is compiled from official Chilean investigations, the results of which have been recognised by the Chilean Government.
Some children were killed or “disappeared” after being deliberately targeted, while others died following the indiscriminate or excessive use of force by security personnel.
Many of these cases are listed in the hundreds of pages of the indictment issued by the Spanish judicial authorities in seeking Pinochet’s extradition to faces charges in that country, for example the case of six-year-old Claudia Valenzuela.
In the early hours of 14 September 1973 police raided Claudia Valenzuela’s home in Talca. She and both her parents, Hector and Hilda, were killed and her younger sister and brother, Paula, 4, and Gonzalo, 2, were wounded.
Police first claimed that Claudia and her parents had been involved in a family suicide and later that they had been killed in a gunfight with police. The official Chilean investigation concluded that the six-year-old Claudia and her parents had been extrajudicially executed .
Amnesty International UK Director David Bull said:
“Amnesty International UK this month launched a campaign on children’s rights, focusing particularly on the importance of upholding these rights during conflict.”
“Amid discussion of legal technicalities and claims about the economic and political situation in Chile at the time, Amnesty International wants to refocus attention on the innocent victims of Pinochet’s security forces.”
“Children need special protection from human rights violations, but in Pinochet’s Chile they were the victims of indiscriminate shootings, extrajudicial executions and “disappearances”.
Midnight shame – USA executes child offender
The execution of Sean Sellers shames the USA and is a further sign of its selective contempt for the international human rights standards it so often claims to support, Amnesty International said today.
Sean Sellers was executed by lethal injection in Oklahoma State Penitentiary just after midnight on 4 February, for crimes committed when he was a 16-year-old boy.
International law prohibits the use of the death penalty against those under 18 at the time of the crimes. It is a principle that is now so widely accepted that no country is exempt from it.
“The USA’s repeated claims that it is the most progressive force for human rights in the world are contradicted by its blatant flouting of the global moral and legal consensus that killing people for their childhood crimes is wrong,” Amnesty International said.
“By executing Sean Sellers, the US authorities have turned their clock back 40 years to the last time a US prisoner was put to death for a crime committed at 16. This cannot be defined as a progressive act.”
The Organisation of American States, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Defence for Children International, the American Bar Association, and Amnesty International were among those who appealed for the execution to be stopped.
On 27 January, the day the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board rejected Sean Sellers plea for clemency, Pope John Paul II challenged the USA to reject the cruelty of the death penalty . However, Oklahoma’s Governor, a Catholic, welcomed the clemency rejection. In television interviews on 3 February he said that the Pope was “wrong” about the death penalty.
“In the end, international law and the global moral consensus was ignored to satisfy perceived domestic opinion,” Amnesty International continued.
“In doing so the authorities have done nothing but deepen the culture of violence in US society. It is time to seek constructive solutions to violent crimes, including those committed by children.”
The execution of Sean Sellers has confirmed the USA as the world’s leading perpetrator of the execution of people under 18 at the time of the crime. It has now executed 10 child offenders since 1990, one more than the rest of the world combined. The nine others killed in the USA were 17 at the time of the crime.
The USA has now carried out the last four executions of child offenders known in the world, having put three such prisoners to death in 1998. Only five other countries are known to have carried out such executions since 1990.
Sean Sellers was the 512th prisoner executed in the USA since it resumed executions in 1977. In the past six years an average of one prisoner a week has been put to death. So far in 1999 the pace has increased to nearly three executions a week. Twelve people have already been killed this year, and at least another 11 are currently facing execution in February.
Background
Against the worldwide trend towards abolition of the death penalty, the USA is not only increasing its own resort to judici
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