What the thread title says.
From the Spanish newspaper “El País” (Spanish).
Simply… Wow. I don’t know what to say or think. On the one hand, “what the hell?” On the other, “man, that judge has stones”. On the gripping hand, “this won’t serve any practical purpose apart from angering China”.
Rather unexpected, also.
Interesting tagline/thread combo. 
As to the story - attempts are made periodically to enforce domestic criminal laws extra-territorially on the basis of universal human rights jurisdiction. In all such attempts, the actual effect depends on the relative power of the jurisdiction making the attempt versus the person on the receiving end - in particular, whether their home jurisdiction buys into it.
In China, for many reasons, such attempts are unlikely to ever be effective. First, of course, China remains quite unapologetic about its adventurism in Tibet. Second, even if China wasn’t, China has a very unfortunate history witn the extraterrtorial application of European country’s laws, making it disinclined to view such attempts favourably.
Aren’t these the same clowns who tried to arrest some Israeli officials a few years back? Good to see them keeping busy, I suppose.
And also the same who had Pinochet arrested in London in 1998.
I guess that there is the “sending a message” angle and all that, but I am at a loss to see what practical result could be achieved by all of this.
Oh well…!
A couple of questions that the articles didn’t make clear (I couldn’t read all of them as some requires signing up).
How does Spain assert jurisdiction in this case? Some articles suggested Spain is citing a legal principle that certain crimes can be prosecuted by any country, even those which have no direct connection to the crime. But other articles suggested there were Spanish victims to the actions of the Chinese officials.
How potentially far-reaching are these warrants? I assume they’re valid in Spain. But are other EU countries obligated to enforce a Spanish warrant? Would Jiang be arrested, for example, if he went to London or Paris or Warsaw?
This is old news. I mentioned it in another thread some days ago.
La Audiencia Nacional imputa al expresidente chino Hu Jintao por genocidio en el Tíbet | Público
The Spanish judicial system is a bad joke. You will not find one more useless or incompetent in any developed country.
If you have a small dispute there is no practical way of using the courts to resolve it. If you have a big dispute get ready to waste tons of money and time in a system that is a crapshoot. It is a huge bureaucracy where no one knows or cares whether they are doing anything useful, all they care is that forms are filled correctly and procedures are followed. The fact that it is all useless does not bother anybody. each person thinks they are doing their job. In the meanwhile cases can take 10, 15 or 20 years and in the end the only winners are the lawyers who have charged huge fees. The whole system is totally fucked up and it is no wonder that you have judges who decide to prosecute Pinochet, Franco or Jiang Zemin.
A totally inept and useless judiciary is one of Spain’s most serious problems because it underlies and causes many other problems like corruption that goes unpunished and businesses who have to shut down because they cannot collect debts.
I could tell quite a few stories about the judicial system in Spain but just the fact that cases take over ten years in processes that are just bureaucratic bullshit is enough to show how ineffective they are. No country has bureaucracy so complicated and useless. All so that a bunch of parasite bureaucrats can draw a salary and pretend they are doing somethig useful.
Of course, Spain has the judiciary it has chosen for itself because the rest of Spain is pretty much fucked up too. You cannot find so much incompetence and things not working in any other developed country. The only consolation of Spain is Greece. A Spaniard can always console himself thinking at least he’s not Greek.
It is a country of clowns. Inept clowns. Useless clowns. Corrupt clowns. And it shows everywhere.
Hm, well… As a Spaniard, in my experience, although my country has troubles, defects and problems that I readily acknowledge (and sometimes despair that they will ever be fixed), I wouldn’t say that we are “clowns”, generically speaking, or that the average Spaniard is inept, useless and/or corrupt. At least, that does not correspond with my decades of life as a Spaniard looking at other Spaniards around me.
And I don’t know about civil jurisprudence, but it seems that criminal cases are solved faster than that. The lowlife who assaulted and raped a very good friend of mine was finally sentenced to something like 15 years in jail two years after his crime. Not exceedingly fast, but not 10 years’ wait, either.
And sorry for the derail of the thread. Let’s go back to our scheduled programming…