When the police arrested Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998, Philippe Sands, an international law expert and writer (London, 1960), received a call. Pinochet's lawyers offered him the opportunity to participate in the case and argue for his immunity as head of state. "My wife [the daughter of a Republican exile] threatened to divorce me if I did it, so I didn't accept," he explains with a smile. He followed the entire trial. Almost two decades later, in 2015, he came across the name Walther Rauff. It appeared in a letter from an SS leader, Otto Wächter, recommending a route he could take to escape justice. "At the time, I didn't recognize the name, but later I remembered that I had read it in Bruce Chatwin's books (In Patagonia) and Roberto Bolaño (Chilean Night). I eventually found out that he had ended up as the manager of a crab canning company in Patagonia," Sands recalls.

Spanish justice has once again been disavowed by international bodies, and this time the cause has not been the Catalan independence bid but its actions with one of its best-known judges, Baltasar Garzón. The United Nations Human Rights Committee, the same that called for the release of Catalan political prisoners, has ruled that the conviction of Judge Baltasar Garzón for prevarication was "arbitrary". In a resolution issued on 13 July and communicated on Wednesday, the body obliges Spain to erase the criminal record of the magistrate and to compensate him adequately for the damage suffered. Thus, this group of the UN argues that Garzon should not have been convicted or disqualified for having tapped the communications of prisoners and lawyers in the Gürtel case.