Governmental Response To Investigation of Alleged Human Rights Violations
A number of domestic and international human rights groups generally operated without government restriction, investigating and publishing their findings on human rights cases. Government officials were cooperative and responsive to their views.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued two rulings against the government in September. In one case, the court ruled the application of the country's 1978 Amnesty Law in the 1973 killing of Luis Almonacid Arellano constituted denial of justice. The court further ruled that the Amnesty Law could not be applied in the Almonacid case or other cases comprising crimes against humanity for purposes of closing investigations or suspending sentence against persons convicted of those crimes. The court ordered that the government pay Almonacid's family $10,000 for legal fees. The government accepted the court's ruling, and at year's end Congress was considering legislation to restrict the scope of the Amnesty Law.
In the case of Claude Reyes, the court issued a ruling regarding the government's refusal to release certain financial information about a forestry contract negotiated with a foreign investor in 1998. The contract was never finalized, and the environmentally sensitive project was terminated. However, the court ruled that the government had violated the plaintiff's right to free speech by denying access to public information without a valid justification. The ruling called on the government to provide all the requested information and guarantee effective access to public information in the future. The court also ordered the government to pay the plaintiffs $10,000 in compensation for legal fees and other expenses.
Read more about this topic: Human Rights In Chile
Famous quotes containing the words governmental, response, alleged, human, rights and/or violations:
“Perhaps one reason that many working parents do not agitate for collective reform, such as more governmental or corporate child care, is that the parents fear, deep down, that to share responsibility for child rearing is to abdicate it.”
—Faye J. Crosby (20th century)
“Because humans are not alone in exhibiting such behavior—bees stockpile royal jelly, birds feather their nests, mice shred paper—it’s possible that a pregnant woman who scrubs her house from floor to ceiling [just before her baby is born] is responding to a biological imperative . . . . Of course there are those who believe that . . . the burst of energy that propels a pregnant woman to clean her house is a perfectly natural response to their mother’s impending visit.”
—Mary Arrigo (20th century)
“The entire construct of the “medical model” of “mental illness”Mwhat is it but an analogy? Between physical medicine and psychiatry: the mind is said to be subject to disease in the same manner as the body. But whereas in physical medicine there are verifiable physiological proofs—in damaged or affected tissue, bacteria, inflammation, cellular irregularity—in mental illness alleged socially unacceptable behavior is taken as a symptom, even as proof, of pathology.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“She, too, would now swim down the river of matrimony with a beautiful name, and a handle to it, as the owner of a fine family property. Women’s rights was an excellent doctrine to preach, but for practice could not stand the strain of such temptation.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“The peace loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of humane instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.... When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)