Perspectivas / Perspectives

 Mar 30.─ Time was when the left in Latin America believed in human rights and welcomed outside pressure to secure them. Now that they are in power, the region's far-left populists bridle at any criticism, domestic or foreign, of their self-proclaimed revolutions. Led by Ecuador's Rafael Correa, these governments have been campaigning to castrate the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and its associated court, bodies that operate under the aegis of the Organisation of American States (OAS). At an extraordinary meeting of the OAS general assembly on March 22nd they failed, at least for the time being.

Ecuador, backed by Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela, wanted to curb the autonomy of the commission and the OAS's rapporteur on freedom of expression and bar them from receiving outside donations.

The government talks of banning Jamaat and the opposition is becoming more aggressively Islamist 

 Mar. 23.─ In 1961 Israel kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from Argentina and put him on trial for crimes committed 20 years earlier. Eichmann had been secretary at the Nazis' Wannsee conference that led to the Holocaust. His trial in Jerusalem was a model of meticulous process. The prosecutor was Israel's attorney-general; the defence lawyer, a leading German attorney; the proceedings were broadcast. They were everything the Holocaust was not: open, subject to evidence and challenge, and legal.

Now consider the trials under way at the International Crimes Tribunal in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. There too, men are being tried for dreadful crimes committed many years ago, in this case in 1971, during Bangladesh's war of independence from Pakistan. The defendants have been accused of genocide, mass murder, mass rape and attempting to exterminate whole groups of people. But their trials have fallen a long way short of Israel's model of due process.