No Dédoublement Fonctionnel? Eluding Avant-Garde International Human Rights Law in Spain: Strategies and Judicial Parallelisms

Resumo

According to the decision of the Supreme Court rendered in Garzón-Memoria Histórica, Francoist crimes cannot be prosecuted in Spain. The judgment offered the unusual example of a national criminal court reluctant to apply avant-garde human rights reasoning, but at the same time having to elaborate in detail on the legal underpinnings of judge Garzón’s “progressive” constructions. From a juridical point of view, the ruling is most interesting due to the use of four judicial strategies in order to avoid the application of avant-garde human rights reasoning: “closure”, “chronological circumvention”, “misinterpretation” and “partial recognition”. A comparative approach to the use of these strategies that considers similar decisions with transitional relevance–mostly from Latin American courts–can shed light on the methodology employed by national judges as regards the assessment of international law sources. At this point, it must be said that, notwithstanding its demerits, the judgment cannot be merely qualified as “parochial”: it underlines the limits of horizontal trans-judicial communication in matters of international criminal law and hints at some uncertainties accompanying avant-garde human rights constructions.