The group had announced in October that they would file their claims today.
In addition to Calderón, the legal action names as defendants Mexico's secretary of public security, Genaro García Luna; the secretary of national defense, Guillermo Galván Galván; and the secretary of marines, Francisco Saynez Méndez. Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, the most wanted man in the world and leader of the Sinaloa cartel, was also named by the complainants, although his whereabouts are unknown and it will be impossible to serve him with a copy of the allegations.
The 700 page lawsuit purports to present evidence of "systematic violations" of human rights in Mexico by the named defendants. Paper and electronic versions of the filing are said to have been signed or endorsed by almost 25,000 persons.
One of the primary sponsors of today's criminal filing is John M. Ackerman (below), a U.S. educated professor who directs a legal research institute at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City. According to published biographical information, Ackerman holds degrees in political sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is not an attorney, however, either in the Mexican legal system or in the United States, and he holds no license to practice law in any jurisdiction. Ackerman is the son of U.S. attorney Bruce Arnold Ackerman, an esteemed American constitutional law professor who is the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale. The senior Ackerman was educated at Harvard and Yale Law School, and is one of the most respected legal academics in the U.S. today.
The International Criminal Court is a tribunal which prosecuted dozens of Slavic military and government officials for crimes against humanity -- including mass murder and rape -- during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. It has also prosecuted various African war lords for similar atrocities committed during civil uprisings. The ICC recently issued an international arrest warrant for one of the sons of deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. To this list of infamous criminal defendants, Felipe Calderón and top members of his administration have now been added.
"What we are reporting to this court (the ICC) is a troublesome series of violations of international human rights violations for which president Felipe Calderon is directly responsible," said the legal documents filed in The Hague today. Mexico submitted to the jurisdiction of the ICC in an 2005 treaty which says that "a military leader will be held criminally accountable for all offenses committed by armed forces under his control."
The Mexican government filed its response to the lawsuit in October, when plans for the criminal complaint were first announced. It has denied all of the allegations.
Most legal experts give today's lawsuit almost no chance of success, since the claims of deliberate war crimes allegedly committed in Mexico's struggle against the drug cartels are far afield from those which have been dealt with by the International Criminal Court in its previous cases. The most likely legal prognosis is that the ICC will refuse to hear the suit.
Are the filers of The Hague lawsuit traitors to Mexico?
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