OCTOBER  16, 1998 was a day Leopoldo García Lucero had been waiting 25 years for. Just before midnight, Scotland Yard officers had served former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet with an arrest warrant as he was lying on his bed recovering from back surgery in the plush The London Clinic, unleashing one of the largest human rights campaigns in living memory.

Leopoldo’s life had been shattered by the coup, which he would often remind us about as REDRESS worked on his case to seek justice and reparations from Chile for the torture he had suffered under Pinochet. A supporter of the deposed President Allende, Leopoldo had been tortured in several concentration camps over the course of 635 days, and rendered permanently disabled as a result. In 1975, he had been forcibly expelled from Chile with his wife and three young daughters.

A huge scar on his forehead caused by a brutal beating with a machine gun, in which he almost lost his left eye, had been a daily reminder of the lack of justice in his case. “I always thought I’d die without ever seeing Pinochet arrested,” he would tell us. “We had suffered in exile for so many years, totally forgotten. Not a single person had ever been punished for what happened to us.”

The arrest of the dictator – who presided over a 17-year reign of terror in Chile in which around 40,000 people were tortured, 3000 murdered or disappeared, and 200,000 forced into exile – gave hope to victims such as Leopoldo. It was also a huge boost to the movement for international justice, and its reverberations can be felt to this day all over the world.

What made that event so consequential is that back then almost nobody thought it possible. While some of Pinochet’s own legal advisers had cautioned him against the trip, considering it too dangerous, he went to the UK nevertheless.

Pinochet believed that he was untouchable, owing to his friendship with former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and the legal wall of absolute impunity he had built around himself back home. Before stepping out of power in 1990, the general had named himself life-long senator with a guaran-tee of parliamentary immunity for life.

A global pursuit of justice Pinochet’s London arrest was a milestone in universal jurisdiction, a doctrine of international law that holds that certain crimes as so heinous that the duty to investigate and prosecute them transcends all borders.

Scotland Yard officers had acted on an international arrest warrant issued by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón on charges of crimes against humanity. It concerned rights abuses committed against Spanish citizens after the September 11, 1973 coup, but mostly Chilean victims.

Universal jurisdiction was not a new principle in 1998 – it had been codified in the Geneva Conventions of 1949. However, it had been rarely used since then. One of such instance led to the conviction of the German-Austrian Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961.

Pinochet’s arrest triggered an epic 16-month legal, political and diplomatic battle, which would see British courts reject the dictator’s claim that he was entitled to immunity as a former head of state, and rule that he could be extradited to Spain to stand trial. This was a defining moment for global justice.

Ultimately, Pinochet would never be extradited, as Home Secretary Jack Straw allowed his return to Chile on the grounds of poor health despite fierce opposition from human rights NGOs, including REDRESS, who took the UK government to court. Nevertheless, his arrest was a wake-up call for tyrants and victims alike.

A justice cascade In Chile, Pinochet’s image as an untouchable figure had been shattered, and the country to which he returned had changed forever after the 503-day London house arrest.

Victims who had been suffering in silence took their cases to the courts and the country saw a dramatic rise in prosecutions of human rights abusers under the dictatorship.

Chilean judges would also increasingly re-examine amnesties that had protected human rights abusers, including Pinochet. Although the general died in 2006 without having been convicted of any charges, he did so under house arrest. During his last years, he faced more than 300 lawsuits, and was indicted for human rights violations, tax evasion and forgery.

The British courts’ decision to narrow the charges against Pinochet to cases of torture also helped give torture victims such as Leopoldo particular visibility, leading to the creation of the Valech Commission, to investigate those crimes.

Leopoldo and his family were among the 3000 Chilean refugees that would settle in the UK, of which 500 settled in Scotland. Among the many examples of the extraordinary support shown by the Scottish people was the refusal by Rolls-Royce’s East Kilbride workers to repair engines for Chilean Hawker Hunter warplanes, a story that has been recently retold in the documentary Nae Pasaran.

The Pinochet effect also set off a justice cascade throughout the world. Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was arrested while visiting Chile in 2005, after a self-imposed exile in Japan. He was eventually extradited to Peru, where he was tried for human rights abuses, abuse of power, bribery and corruption, and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The tireless campaign of victims and human rights groups to bring to justice Chad’s brutal former dictator Hissène Habré, also known as "Africa’s Pinochet", was certainly inspired by Pinochet’s arrest. Habré, whose rule saw over 40,000 people murdered and 200,000 tortured, was convicted in a Senegal court in 2016 and sentenced to life in prison.

The fight for global justice in Europe

We must remember, however, that all these cases did not begin with Pinochet’s arrest. They were the product of decades of relentless work by victims, human rights activists and lawyers. They also developed in the context of an undeniable trend towards greater international justice, evidenced, for example, by 1998 adoption of the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court. But the case was deeply influential, because it unveiled the possibilities of universal jurisdiction.

Cases in Europe extended the Pinochet precedent to human rights violations in Guatemala, Argentina, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Afghanistan, the USA and other countries. Many countries in Europe also set up specialised war crimes units of prosecutors and investigators.

A recent joint report by REDRESS, Trial International and other NGOs indicates that this momentum is still going strong. In 2017 alone, 126 suspects of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes from 21 countries were investigated, prosecuted or brought to trial in 14 countries in Europe, Latin America and Africa.

Despite these advances, in the last 15 years there have also been setbacks, as countries such as Spain and Belgium, once considered pioneers in driving forward universal jurisdiction, have changed their laws to restrict their court’s ability to hear such cases.

In the UK, the Pinochet case has unfortunately brought only four such trials, including the cases of Afghan warlord Faryadi Sarwar Zardad, who was convicted to 20 years in prison in 2005; Nepalese general Kumar Lama, which ultimately collapsed in 2016, and the ongoing trial against Agnes Taylor, the ex-wife of former Liberian president Charles Taylor.

So while it’s time to celebrate the advances the Pinochet affair has brought in its 20th anniversary, the fight for global justice is far from over.