The Federal Court of Appeals of Mar del Plata confirmed on Friday the dismissal of Pedro Hooft and other judges who had been accused of complicity with crimes against humanity committed in the last dictatorship, a decision that will be appealed before Cassation by the human rights organizations that promoted the process, as announced.
Hooft was accused of refusing habeas corpus and of guarantee the impunity of repressors in 17 cases of victims of homicides, disappearances and tortureamong other crimes against humanity committed during the last civic-military dictatorship.
The news was communicated through a Twitter message by his daughter Lynette Hooft.
The Mar del Plata Federal Chamber pointed out that Hooft did not commit any of the crimes that had been reported in 2006.
The ruling was dictated by the chamberlains Alexander Tazza and Santiago Martinwho confirmed the dismissal issued by the federal judge Martin Bava on December 11, 2020.
Tazza and Martín pointed out that in the 15 years of the process initiated against Hooft and other defendants “sufficient evidence could be gathered to rule out the participation of the defendants in the events that were recriminated against, since the elements in the case file allow weighing the alienation of those named in the criminal design instituted in the case”.
At the end of 2020, in the first instance ruling, Bava had indicated that “it could never be corroborated” that the defendants -including Hooft- “had intentionally engaged in functional behaviors that could be projected in some way in a supposed crime against humanity”.
Judge Hooft had been denounced in 2006 by the Secretary of Human Rights of the Nationfrom where he was held responsible for alleged crimes against humanity while his family maintained from the beginning that it was an armed cause.
Hooft, at that time, was accused of rthrow out habeas corpus and of guarantee the impunity of repressors in 17 cases of victims of homicides, disappearances and torture, among other imprescriptible crimes committed by the last dictatorship, within the framework of the so-called “Night of the ties” which took place in Mar del Plata between July 6 and 13, 1977.
This is what the sequence of kidnappings, torture and disappearances of which 14 people were victims, mostly employment and family lawyersamong them Norberto Centeno (author of the Labor Contract Law), who was murdered, as well as Jorge Candeloro, Salvador Manuel Arestín, Raúl Hugo Alais, Tomás Fresneda, María de las Mercedes Argañaraz de Fresneda, Néstor García Mantica and María Esther Vázquez de García, all of them murdered or disappeared.
The case against Hooft arose from a complaint of the late former Secretary of Human Rights of the Nation, Eduardo Luis Duhaldein which he requested that the alleged “co-authors, instigators, accomplices, participants of any kind and/or accessories to the crimes of qualified homicide, aggravated illegitimate deprivation of liberty, torture followed by death” suffered by the victims of that succession of kidnappings committed in 1977 by Army task forces.
