Submitted by CRIN on
[17 September 2014] -
Children born to politically persecuted parents in exile have the right to economic compensation, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday.
Justices Ricardo Lorenzetti, Elena Highton de Nolasco, Carlos Fayt and Juan Carlos Maqueda yesterday issued a ruling benefiting two daughters of a couple who were forced to flee the country as they feared for their lives during the last military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983.
“Neither the children nor the exiles decided to stay in a foreign country voluntarily,” the six-page writ says.
“Justice has been done,” one of the two women who filed a complaint to be recognized as victims of the military dictatorship, Eleonora De Maio, told the Herald.
With the decision, the members of the country’s highest tribunal overturned a ruling issued by the Federal Administrative Appeals Court, which considered that the daughters of the couple could not receive the economic compensation for former detainees or disappeared people as they had not been deprived of their freedom.
In 2007, the Human Rights Secretariat refused to pay economic compensation to Eleonora and her twin sister, Ana, who filed a complaint in an administrative court to appeal the decision. The Administrative Appeals Court validated the decision made by the secretariat and the Attorney-General’s office.
“It was not about the money, it was about rights. When I heard the news, I started thinking of all the things we had been through. I remembered when we came back to the country in September 1985, the discrimination and mistreatment we received. We are Argentines but our ID cards say something else,” De Maio — who is a lawyer and lives in Tierra del Fuego — said.
The case
Eleonora’s parents, Tomás Alfredo de Maio and Ana Emilia del Pozo, were arrested on October 10, 1975, during María Estela Martínez de Perón’s term in office, and were released on December 23, 1976, nine months after the last military coup. Del Pozo was included in a list of militants from the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP) wanted by the military government that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983.
The couple was kidnapped in Avellaneda, Greater Buenos Aires, by the parapolice organization Triple A and then taken to legal prisons. Del Pozo was held at the Olmos and Villa Devoto penitentiary units and her husband was taken to a prison in Sierra Chica, Buenos Aires province. Their eldest daughter was also abducted but was finally recovered by members of the family.
Eleonora’s parents lost their jobs and decided to escape to Bolivia and then to Peru and Venezuela, where Eleonora and Ana were born. De Maio and Del Pozo applied for refugee status, which was awarded by the UN. It was the UN that ended up paying for their tickets back to Buenos Aires when democracy returned to the country.
Grounds
The Supreme Court had to determine if Ana and Eleonora de Maio went through a situation similar to the one considered in Law 24,043, passed in 1991 that establishes a payment for those held in illegal custody between November 1974 and December 1983. The law to compensate political prisoners was approved during Carlos Menem’s presidency as an effort to give monetary compensation to those who had suffered the last military dictatorship, who could not take their cases to court because of the amnesty laws that were in effect for those officers who committed crimes during the period of military rule.
That compensation law divided the human rights movement, a discussion that has been cast aside in recent years as the perpetrators began being taken to court after the Supreme Court declared the amnesties unconstitutional.
According to the members of the Supreme Court, judges should have a broader idea of what “detention” means, to not only consider those who were in a clandestine prison.
“The plaintiffs were forced — as a direct consequence of the illegal state action — to be raised in a different social and cultural background, that also affected their family ties,” the members of the Supreme Court said yesterday.
Ana was not in the country when she received the good news. Her sister, Eleonora, could not believe her eyes when a friend sent her a message. “It has been 35 years of adverse decisions,” Eleonora wept.