Clarin: Pact with Iran: a judge accuses Cristina of treason

By Daniel Santoro, 23 December 2015

The reason for so much political maneuvering was a political mystery until now. Cristina Kirchner carried out the removal, in May, of Judge Luis Cabral of the Court of Cassation. Then she challenge his colleague Juan Carlos Gemignani and appointed two K-lawyers. All of this after Gemignani signed his vote on the pact with Iran over the AMIA and kept it in a safe, because he had learned that its explosive contents had reached the ears of Legal and Technical Secretary Carlos Zannini, one of the judicial operators for Cristina. If Cabral had added his vote to Gemignani’s, the pact would have been declared unconstitutional in May and Cristina probably would already have been charged over her actions.

Now Clarin has gotten exclusive access to a copy of that vote from Gemignani that declared the pact with Iran unconstitutional and which accuses Cristina, former Foreign Minister Hector Timerman and others of transferring Argentina’s sovereignty to Iran, which he calls “the suspect state” in ordering the attack. This transfer of sovereignty to another country falls under the crime of treason.

“Any prosecutor may now ask for that vote and accuse Cristina and Timerman of covering up for the Iranians, and of treason, which is implied in the document,” said one high judicial source.

The 47 page opinion relied on jurisprudence and legal arguments from Nisman’s complaint over covering up for the five Iranians accused of masterminding the attack. Nisman’s complaint was archived by Federal Judge Daniel Rafecas. The prosecutor from Cassation, Raul Plee, requested the secret documentation be sent from the Foreign Ministry to Rafecas for him to reopen the case. Now Gemignani’s vote is another argument in that direction.

The pact with Iran was unconstitutional – said Gemignani- also because the attack against the AMIA in 1994 had been declared a crime against humanity by Justice and by decree from former President Nestor Kirchner in 2006.

Gemignani cited the judgment of the Court in the so-called Julio Simon case (who used the alias “Turco” Julian) that declared the laws of Due Obedience and Final Point unconstitutional and reclaimed the sovereignty of Argentina to investigate the oppressors who then began to face charges in Spanish courts. Even Eugenio Zaffaroni, close to Kirchnerism, voted in favor of that.

By Gemignani accepting the declaration of unconstitutionality requested by the AMIA and the DAIA, he had said that Cristina’s government and the lawmakers who voted for the pact inflicted “a triple injury to national sovereignty.”

On the one hand, to accept the truth commission- which would be made up of five international jurists- means “admitting foreign interference” over Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral who is in charge of the AMIA case. On the other, “Iran is authorized to appoint its members” and it also “prohibits the inclusion of Argentines.”

Then he points out that Article 19 of the Constitution prohibits the President from exercising judicial power and stressed that “there is no precedent” in the history of prosecution of terrorist attacks of a state of allowing the creation of a special commission which “cedes the appointment of the members of the commission to another country.”

The rules of the pact “constitute a considerable restriction on the exercise of the power of incarceration” by the judge “insomuch as they establish the rescinding of the red alerts on those responsible,” which was one of the points that Nisman denounced against Timerman. Cristina’s opinion that the pact would help solve the AMIA bombing “is a simplistic, infantile and reductionist worldview and conforms in essence to denying the idea of responsibility” for the attack, Gemignani concluded.

Original Text