Argentina has called for the extradition of four Spanish former officials accused of torturing victims of the Franco regime in a decision described as historic by the lawyers and human rights activists who brought the case.
As in the case of Augusto Pinochet – the former Chilean dictator whose arrest was ordered by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón in 1998 – an Argentinian judge issued warrants for the four men under an international law allowing human rights abuses to be investigated and tried elsewhere if the country in which they occurred does not do so.