On January 6, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed itself and upheld a $54.6 million jury verdict against two retired Salvadoran generals in favor of three torture survivors from El Salvador. Close to a dozen former Boalt International Human Rights Law Clinic (IHRLC) students were instrumental in the legal work on behalf of the plaintiffs in Romagoza Arce et al v. Garciaet al under Professor Emeritus Carolyn Patty Blum, the clinic’s founding director.
The San Francisco-based Center for Justice & Accountability (CJA) filed the case in 1999 under two federal statutes, the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) and the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA).
To read more about the case, please visit The New York Times.
Another win by Boalt’s International Human Rights Law Clinic—the favorable decision in October by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the right to nationality and education of two Dominican girls–is discussed as part of an Op-Ed examining critical human rights victories that appeared in the International Herald Tribune on December 22, 2005.