Manos Limpias
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Manos Limpias (English "clean hands") is a civil servants' trade union registered in Spain. Manos Limpias was founded in 1995 as an organization representing employees of the Spanish public services. It has no institutional representation as of 2009. The group takes their name from the Mani Pulite judiciary movement in Italy instigated by Antonio Di Pietro. At present, the union has over 6,000 members, who financially contribute with an annual fee of 60 euros. The group was inspired and founded by the Spanish lawyer Miguel Bernad Remon.
Manos Limpias main goal is to defend the Constitutional Rule of law against corruption and separatist nationalism. Manos Limpias is independent from any party, and claims to have no ideological affiliation; however most of the lawsuits brought by them to court were consistently against the socialist left or against the separatist far right in Catalonia and Basque Country, with some exceptions of cases against the centre-right Partido Popular. The group has been often described by the left-leaning media as a far-right organisation due to the links of Mr. Bernad with the far right during the early eighties.
Manos Limpias has achieved some legal successes such as the conviction of contempt of court of the president of the Basque parliament, Juan Maria Atutxa, for disobeying the Supreme Court’s requirement to disband Sozialista Abertzaleak the political wing of ETA.
Manos Limpias has achieved some notoriety in the international press after filing a lawsuit against the controversial Spanish investigating judge Baltasar Garzon. After the judiciary stopped Garzon from investigating war-crimes committed during the Spanish Civil War for contravening the 1977 amnesty law and breaking the principle of irretroactivity of law, as the crimes under investigation were previous to 1940, whereas the concept of crimes against humanity was not implemented in International Law until 1945.
Manos Limpias accused Garzon of breaking the 1977 Amnesty law, exceeding his competences as an investigating judge of the Audiencia Nacional and deliberately acting in an unjust and unfair manner (after Garzon dismissed an indictment against communist politician Santiago Carrillo, accused of crimes against humanity in 1998, based on the principle of irretroactivity). In May 2009 the Supreme Court allowed the Manos Limpias prosecution of Balzar for to proceed in an action for prevarication: his "blatant, deliberate, conscious and arrogant role" in "trespass against the dead". The case is still in process as of February 2010, and Garzon may be disqualified as result.
In an interview with the Spanish Catholic radio Station COPE at the time of the indictment, the founder of Clean Hands, Miguel Bernard, claimed that, by admitting the latest action against Garzon,the Supreme Court had given a boost to its mission of battling against the current "deterioration in the rule of law" There had been some twenty previous attempts from Manos Limpias to incriminate Garzon, for various alleged offenses including negligence or delay in the seizure of taverns used by ETA terrorists, for contributing to an in the left-wing national newspaper El País, for contributing to a interview with former parliamentary president Felipe González, for participating in a rally against the war in Iraq and for leaking the medical report of Augusto Pinochet. [1] Other Manos Limpias complaints include allegations of homosexuality in a popular children's TV puppet show "los Lunnies".
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