Briton Feels Pull in Tug of War Over Pinochet

Home Secretary Jack Straw, a onetime student radical turned pragmatic politician, has one of the most powerful jobs in Britain and one of the most coveted.

However, there was little envy for the country’s top law enforcement official in Britain on Thursday as pressures mounted on Straw in the international tug-of-war over former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Several conservative newspapers and opposition members of Parliament stepped up their calls for Straw to exercise his discretion to let Pinochet return home to Chile on humanitarian grounds, and Chilean Foreign Minister Jose Miguel Insulza was to arrive here today to argue for Pinochet’s immediate release. Meanwhile, members of Straw’s own Labor Party insisted that he must allow a Spanish extradition request for Pinochet to go forward in court.

Straw is “impaled on the horns of a dilemma,” noted the Daily Telegraph newspaper, which carried a cartoon of the bespectacled Straw getting whacked in the head with the scales of justice weighted down by Pinochet.

“I think he is in an extremely tricky situation politically,” said John Barnes, a professor of government at the London School of Economics. “He must be concerned about Britain’s relations with Chile and possibly other countries. . . . But in the end, I think he will not intervene to stop this. He would be making too many enemies in his own camp.”

Britain’s highest court issued a landmark decision Wednesday that a former head of state is not immune to prosecution for crimes against humanity, such as the charges of torture and genocide on which Spain is seeking to try Pinochet.

Minister Requests Deadline Extension

The ruling threw the case onto Straw, overseer of Britain’s system of criminal law, police and prisons. He has asked a lower court to extend his Wednesday deadline on making a decision on the case so that he may review the many submissions expected from both sides.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has insisted that Straw will make his decision on purely legal grounds. However, political considerations cannot help but come to bear on a government that first let Pinochet into the country to buy weapons and take tea with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and then arrested him last month.

Straw has refused to comment because he will be acting in a quasi-judicial role. His office said he is not permitted to consult other Cabinet ministers in coming to a decision--not even the prime minister. He will look at whether the alleged crimes are extraditable offenses, the extradition request has been properly authenticated, the crimes were political and there are any “compassionate grounds” to be considered, a spokeswoman said.

The Times of London reported today that Pinochet will try to convince Straw that he is suffering from a stress-related disorder.

A former student activist who cut his teeth on political demonstrations, the 51-year-old Straw would be expected to sympathize with the anti-Pinochet forces, many of whom were victims of the dictator’s bloody regime.

“He’s one of them; he shares their political roots,” said Jonathan Freedland, a political commentator for the Guardian newspaper.

But Freedland warned that Straw is not an easy read and has bent over backward since taking office 1 1/2 years ago to “play the adult politician beyond the gestures of student politics.”

He is a liberal at heart and lawyer by training who, as one of his first official acts, incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law. Yet many of his decisions have gone surprisingly against the liberal grain.

Official Will Weigh Relations With Chile

Straw refused to reduce the life sentence of Myra Hindley, a woman who admitted murdering five children and repented. He coauthored a controversial anti-terrorism bill that was hastily passed in the wake of August’s bombing in Omagh, Northern Ireland. The law has come under criticism from civil rights activists. And, like U.S. Democrats trying to show they are tough on crime, Straw has been an advocate of imposing nightly curfews on teenagers.

In the Pinochet case, “if Straw were told that there were serious international pressure not to do this [allow the extradition case to go to court], this would weigh on him more than someone still of the old left,” Freedland said.

The United States has yet to make its opinion on the Pinochet case known or, apparently, felt in the Home Office.

Straw will probably weigh Britain’s relations with Chile, the country’s staunchest ally in Latin America, against relations with its European neighbors, many of whom want a piece of Pinochet. France and Switzerland also have filed extradition requests.

Straw will feel the demands of his own Labor Party along with international desires to see the world’s dictators account for their crimes. He may measure these demands against the precedent-setting nature of this case for British law and government: In deciding this case, Britain’s highest court has made--rather than simply interpreted--the country’s law on sovereign immunity.

“This smacks more of the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Barnes of the London School of Economics. “There is a tension here about the court playing that role and trenching into the field of foreign affairs.”

In some ways, commentators say, the “easiest” choice for Straw would be to send Pinochet home on the grounds that it is the humane thing to do for the 83-year-old former dictator or, perhaps, for a divided Chile.

If Straw allows the case to go to court, he undoubtedly will be the target of lawsuits from Pinochet’s lawyers and others who will allege that he acted improperly. The extradition case, meanwhile, could drag on for years through appeals, back to the Law Lords and then to Straw.

Minister May Not Take Easy Road

However, Straw is not necessarily one to take the easy road, according to Polly Toynbee, who wrote a profile of him for the Independent newspaper shortly after he took office last year.

“What kind of home secretary will Jack Straw be? Pragmatic, certainly, but no cynical crowd-pleaser,” she wrote. “His pragmatism ensures a cool assessment of what really works, based on hard evidence.”

She predicted that “some liberal nerve endings will twitch” and noted that he does not fear the scorn of liberals.

However, she added that “public opinion matters . . . as he knows he can do little without it.”

Conservative Member of Parliament Michael Howard joined the chorus of those calling for Straw to halt the extradition process.

“We think this has gone on for too long. We think he should be sent back to Chile,” he said. “They reached a settlement in Chile after a very, very painful period. Those old wounds have been opened. That can’t be in anyone’s interest.”

Former Tory Defense Secretary Michael Portillo said Chile’s settlement with Pinochet was much like the agreement Britain had reached with Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland.

“I don’t like what we’ve done with [Sinn Fein leader] Gerry Adams,” he said. “But it’s our business what we do with Gerry Adams, and it’s their business what they’re doing with Pinochet.”

Internal Politics May Weigh Heavily

In the end, however, most observers believe that internal rather than international politics will sway Straw to give the Pinochet case back to the courts to decide on extradition.

“It would be virtually impossible for Jack Straw to go against the judgment of the highest court,” said Tony Benn, a Labor member of Parliament, at once analyzing and pressing Straw. “It would make no sense. There is no support for it. This was a historic judgment of worldwide interest. It would undermine Britain’s arguments against [Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein.”

Watching the maneuvering, the Guardian’s Freedland said, “I can’t imagine how he could take the political flak of letting him go.”