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Spain's Judge Garzon not taken seriously this time

Basque demonstrators carrying an oversized Basque flag are reflected in a mirror at a rally held in Bilbao, northern Spain on Saturday. The pro-independence demonstrators were commemorating the death of a Basque separatist group ETA member who was shot and killed a week ago by police. Spain's Judge Baltasar Garzon has needed a bodyguard for 15 years after taking on armed Basque separatists in court. PHOTO: EPA

Who's next, a newspaper cartoonist asked. Darth Vader?

He was referring to the crusading Spanish judge with an appetite for big, perhaps uncatchable fish: first, ex-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and now Osama bin Laden.

The cartoon in El Mundo depicts Judge Baltasar Garzon pointing imperiously at the Star Wars villain, ordering Spanish cops to nab him.

Garzon's surprise indictment Wednesday of the reputed Sept. 11 mastermind and 34 other terror suspects has shined yet more limelight on the dapper judge, stirring debate on whether his passion for justice is also a grab for celebrity.

A human rights lawyer defends what Garzon is doing. But Spain's attorney general sounds underwhelmed by the latest 700-page ruling, and a senior opposition politician asks whether the Spanish judicial system shouldn't rather deal with its own backlog of crime.

And some Spanish media, while calling Garzon brave for going after the world's most wanted man, labeled his crusade an ultimately futile exercise in making headlines.

"Let's be serious," La Vanguardia's Lluis Foix wrote in a Web page piece hours after the indictment came out. "Garzon getting his picture on the cover of The New York Time tomorrow means nothing more than just that."

His title is judge, but Garzon is more like a US district attorney, although in Spain the job is filled by an exam, not an election. Garzon got it at 32 to become the youngest investigative magistrate at the National Court, Spain's highest criminal tribunal. which deals with serious offenses like terrorism.

At 47, married with three children, the workaholic from a modest background in Spain's olive-growing Jaen region is an undisputed legal juggernaut who has taken on every conceivable kind of criminal: millionaire drug lords, armed Basque separatists and the government-backed death squads that targeted them.

Because of Basque threats he has had a bodyguard for 15 years.

Garzon rose to international fame in 1998 by having Pinochet arrested while the aging ex-dictator visited London, seeking to bring him to Madrid for trial on charges of human rights abuses in his native Chile.

Spanish courts let Garzon proceed, but after more than a year of legal wrangling Britain freed Pinochet on health grounds and sent him home.

In that case, in recent suits seeking extradition of 40 former Argentine military officers for trial here and to some extent in the bin Laden indictment, Garzon invoked Spanish legislation spelling out crimes deemed so heinous they can be tried in Spain even if they were not committed there.

But El Mundo said that were bin Laden caught, he would certainly be tried in the US. "Thus, one cannot arrive at any other conclusion: this time, Garzon Superstar's desire for notoriety has led him to overdo it."

Attorney General Jesus Cardenal, while reserving final judgment on the indictment until he had read it all, noted that he has never agreed with court rulings giving Spain cross-border jurisdiction.

Although some accuse him of being publicity-hungry, Garzon is notoriously media-shy and rarely gives interviews. But he did talk to El Pais in an interview a week ago.

"We cannot fight a crime against humanity if we do not accept the priority of universal justice," he said. "It should be possible to pursue the authors of these acts anywhere in the world ... .

Miguel Angel de la Cruz, a veteran reporter for TV station Antena 3, has covered the National Court and Garzon for 15 years and wrote a book about him. He says Garzon is indeed a dogged, fearless judge who has done many good things. "The guy is a great judge," he said. "He's dared to take on everybody."

But in his zeal Garzon sometimes stumbles, and many of his cases have failed to hold up in court, de la Cruz said.

Carlos Taibo, a political science professor at Complutense University in Madrid, agrees. "He goes too fast," Taibo said. "The image that many jurists have of Garzon is that he is not very rigorous in the strictly legal sense."

They point to Garzon's recent choice of date for jailing an Islamic terror suspect, Al-Jazeera reporter Tayssir Alouni: the second anniversary of Sept. 11.

"Couldn't he have done it August 22? No," de la Cruz said. "He had to do it on a key date so he'd get his picture in the paper."

Among Garzon's defenders is Joan Garces, a human rights lawyer who was an aide to Salvador Allende, the president whom Pinochet ousted, and who was involved in Garzon's case against the general.

He says that since Garzon has had al-Qaeda members in jail here since November 2001 and now indicted them, it makes sense to charge their leader as well.

"Speaking strictly in terms of legal logic, it is perfectly defensible," Garces said. And if some Sept. 11 planning took place in Spain, as Garzon asserts, he would have no choice but to go after bin Laden even if other countries want him, too, Garces said.

And if Garzon seems to be everywhere at once it is simply because he's committed, not obsessed with fame, Garces said. "Not all judges have the same capacity for work," he said. "Some are driven to investigate and some are simply bureaucrats who get paid and don't worry about things too much."
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