Palermo (2025), “Dictatorship and Judicial Complicity: The Case of Argentina.”

Omar Palermo. “Dictatorship and Judicial Complicity: The Case of Argentina.” In Transitional Justice and the Criminal Responsibility of Judges. Edited by Claudia Cárdenas Aravena, Jaime Couso Salas, Florian Jeßberger, Milan Kuhli, pp. 46-60. London: Routledge, 2025.

Summary: The systematic and widespread failure to investigate crimes committed by the judiciary during Argentina’s most recent civil-military dictatorship (1976–1983) is arguably the most significant denial of justice in the country’s history. Throughout those years, judges and prosecutors were made aware of the atrocities being perpetrated through complaints or habeas corpus petitions filed by the families of the victims. However, not a single one of these complaints was acted upon. This allowed thousands of enforced disappearances, homicides, child abductions, kidnappings, unlawful detentions, torture, sexual abuse, home invasions, and other grave crimes to proceed with impunity, greeted with official silence.

The blatant manner in which legal complaints were apparently discounted without even the most basic investigative measures being taken raises the question of whether dictatorship-era judges and prosecutors merely committed crimes against the administration of justice or, in some sense, themselves took part in the crimes that went uninvestigated. This chapter addresses this question by positing that judges and prosecutors collaborated with the human rights violations of the dictatorship years, providing a guarantee of impunity that perpetrators relied upon when carrying out their heinous acts.

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