The juridical response to cases of serious human rights violations in Spain —particularly, the literal application of the internal law to crimes committed during the Franco regime— raises the problem about the sufficiency of this formula to achieve transitional justice purposes, specifically, the right to justice and the fight against the impunity. In this sense, there are arguments aimed to demonstrate the need to deconstruct and reformulate the legal sphere facing such cases, incorporating some categories of international law and other ethical-political sources, such as memory. This article analyzes the reasoning of the Provincial Court of Madrid in judgement 640/2018 on a case of «stolen children», as an example of simplistic application of Law, and proposes a more complex interpretation which ultimately has an impact on the direct application of the imprescriptibility of criminal action in these cases.
Keywords:
Transitional justice, stolen children, right to justice, memory, imprescriptibility
Author Biography
Angela Rosa Peralta Jordan, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Ángela Rosa Peralta Jordán es abogada de la Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile, y máster en Estudios Avanzados en Derechos Humanos de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, España.
Peralta Jordan, A. R. (2020). Analysis of the judgement 640/2018 on stolen children during the Franco regime. Anuario De Derechos Humanos, 16(1), 81–90. https://doi.org/10.5354/0718-2279.2020.54481