CJA In The News

The ruling of a Miami judge to deport Army General Jose Guillermo Garcia, a former defense minister of El Salvador, serves as a victory for human rights supporters, despite the difficulties to implement the rule anytime soon.

This week, in response to a lawsuit filed by The New York Times and Julia Preston, the Executive Office of Immigration Review of the Department of Justice released an immigration judge ruling, which ordered that former Salvadoran Defense Minister José Guillermo García is subject to removal from the United States due to his assistance and participation in the torture of Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) client Dr. Juan Romagoza, among many other civilians. The ruling also cites Garcia’s assistance and participation in the 1980 extrajudicial killing of the four American churchwomen, the 1981 Sheraton Hotel killings of two Americans and a Salvadoran land reform leader, the 1981 massacre at El Mozote, the 1980 massacre at the Sumpul River, the assassination of the leaders of FDR, the political opposition, among many other killings and massacres.

An immigration judge has found that a former defense minister in El Salvador, a close ally of the United States during a civil war there in the 1980s, should be deported because of his involvement in a number of human rights violations, including the assassination of an archbishop and the massacre of more than 1,000 peasants.

Executive Director Pamela Merchant discusses the Center for Justice & Accountability’s work with Joshua Johnson of KQED.

The United Nations Human Rights Council voted to open an international investigation into possible war crimes by both the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tiger rebels in the final stages of a 26-year civil war that ended in 2009. This investigation is an important step towards breaking the cycle of impunity that fuels ongoing and serious human rights violations in Sri Lanka today. Read more here.

After seven years, the American Psychological Association recently decided to close an ethics case against a Guantanamo psychologist without taking disciplinary action. This is not merely an isolated story about a single individual’s reprieve from accountability.

A report by Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice, endorsed by CJA, finds credible allegations of post-war international crimes by government forces against Tamils in Sri Lanka’s north, nearly five years after the end of a three-decade civil war. These findings challenge the Sri Lankan government’s claims of post-war progress and underscore the urgent need to fight impunity with accountability. Click here to read the report; CJA’s foreword starts on page vi.

A new report by Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice, endorsed by CJA, finds credible allegations of post-war international crimes by government forces against Tamils in Sri Lanka’s north, nearly five years after the end of a three-decade civil war

A federal judge in California on Monday revoked the U.S. citizenship of a former Guatemalan special forces officer and sentenced him to a maximum 10-year prison term for deceiving U.S. immigration officials and covering up his role in a 1982 massacre of 250 villagers in Guatemala, one of the worst atrocities in modern times in Latin America.

The U.S. has defended a judge’s decision ordering General Vides-Casanova’s removal from the U.S. for his role in widespread human rights abuses in El Salvador in the 1980s, including the torture of CJA’s clients and the murder of four American churchwomen. Click here for the press release, here to read the full immigration court decision or here to read a summary of the oral arguments of the appeal hearing.