GERMAN ARREST WARRANT FOR FORMER DICTATOR VIDELA

On December 15th, the Nuremberg district court issued another arrest warrant for Jorge Rafael Videla, the former head of the Argentinean military junta that governed the country from 1976 until 1983, on the suspicion of having been involved in the murder of the German citizen Rolf Stawowiok. In January 2010 the Nuremberg-Fürth state prosecutors' office suspended the proceedings because of the suspect's absence.  

The Nuremberg court with jurisdiction over the ongoing criminal investigations that began in 1998 related to human rights abuses perpetrated against German citizens during the Argentinean military dictatorship, has already issued several arrest warrants against members of the military who were either directly or indirectly involved in the atrocities. The arrest warrants against the former junta members Jorge Rafael Videla and Eduardo Emilio Massera, which the district court first issued in 2003, were the subject of the intense international publicity. The two former member of the junta are accused of having participated in the murder of the two German; Elisabeth Käsemann und Klaus Zieschank. Initially the search for the two former officers took place via Interpol with the help of a European Arrest Warrant (EAW). The Federal German Republic requested the extradition of the accused for the case of Elisabeth Käsemann. When the extradition request was turned down, the attorney of the German embassy appealed the decision. The appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court as the court of last instance due to the fact that Videla is already facing a number of criminal proceedings in his own country, among others for the kidnapping of children, murder and torture. Due to his age he is not in pre-trial detention, but has been under house-arrest for years. The case of Elisabeth Käsemann is scheduled to be heard by the federal court in Buenos Aires in the course of 2010. 

The first criminal complaint in the case of the German citizen Rolf Stawowiok, who was disappeared at the age of 20, was filed by attorney Wolfgang Kaleck in May 2001.  Kaleck acted on behalf of the Coalition against Impunity. Since 1998 the Coalition has instigated investigations in the cases of approximately 50 predominantly German torture victims and family members against more than 90 Argentinean members of the military.

Rolf Stawowiok was born in 1957 worked as a chemist in a metallurgical factory in Buenos Aires. During the afternoon of February 21st, 1978 he was kidnapped by members of the military and has since been considered to have disappeared. Despite many efforts by his father who resided in Argentina to locate him it was not possible to detect his whereabouts. In August 2004 the Nuremberg-Fürth state prosecutors' office discontinued the case of Rolf Stawowiok together with a number of similar cases, claiming there was a lack of evidence in cases of disappearances that the disappeared had been murdered by the military, within the definition of the murder provision of the German Criminal Code (§211 CC). Appeals against the decision remained unsuccessful.  

On March 14th, 1978 the bodies of five young people were found in the vicinity of Buenos Aires, in the small town of Lomas de Zamora. The coroner's inquest found gunshot wounds as the cause of death, and the dead were buried as nameless (N.N.) in a mass grave. In the summer of 2008, following a DNA comparison a group of forensic anthropologists identified Rolf Stawowiok as one of the murder victims. Otto Krause, Héctor Ramón Rosales and the just 18 year-old Laura Isabel Feldmann were found together with him. To this date, it has not been possible to identify the fifth corpse.  

Following confirmation of the identification of the victims by an Argentinean court, the Nuremberg-Fürth state prosecutors' office reopened the criminal investigation and requested the arrest warrant against former dictator Videla that has since been granted. As it was already evident, due to the unsuccessful deportation proceedings in the Käsemann case, that Argentina would not extradite Videla, the state prosecutor suspended the proceedings. Nevetheless, the arrest warrants issued against Videla remain in effect.   

Attorney Wolfgang Kaleck, one of the spokespersons of the Coalition against Impunity has praised the efforts of the Nuremberg judiciary as providing "important support to the ongoing efforts in Argentina for the judicial inquiry and prosecution of the dictatorship's crimes."  He further added: "The fact that investigations have been opened, arrest warrants issued and verdicts delivered around Europe, including in Spain, Italy, France and Germany in connection with the human rights abuses in Argentina, have contributed to the fact the criminal proceedings have been reopened after many, long years of impunity within Argentina."