BY JOHN SANFORD

Terry Karl, director of the Center for Latin American Studies, said she considers Spanish Judge Magistrate Baltasar Garzón a hero.

"I want to be clear: I have never publicly called anybody a hero," Karl continued in her introductory remarks to Garzón's talk Thursday in the Fletcher Room of the Law School.

The event was part of Talking Heads 2001, a series of bi-weekly forums organized by Assistant Professor Fernando Gomez-Herrero of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. The forums address a wide variety of topics.

More than 170 people packed the room to hear Garzón speak on the need for the International Criminal Court. The investigating judge made headlines around the world in late 1998 when he began efforts to extradite former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet from Britain.

Karl's remarks were stirring.

She said that when she learned of Pinochet's arrest in Britain, she "sat down and ... started to cry."

"I started to cry because I thought of the day, in 1973, when I personally led Chilean children into a room to try to identify pictures of their dead parents," she said. "I thought of what it was like to walk with small children at my side and say, 'Is this your mother? Is this your father? Do you recognize this person? Is this your grandmother?'"

More than 3,000 people were killed or disappeared under Pinochet's rule, which began in 1973 when a military coup brought him to power and ended in 1990.

"Superjudge"

Garzón spent several years at a seminary before earning a law degree at the University of Seville. In his early 30s, he became an investigating judge for Spain's National Court.

Dressed in a suit and tie, his graying hair combed back, Garzón offered, through a translator, a humorous explanation of why he couldn't deliver his lecture in English.

He said that while studying at seminary, he had asked the dean if it was possible to study the language.

"He told me that English did not agree with the authentic Catholic tradition," Garzón said.

Garzón, 45, has earned the moniker "superjudge" in Spain. He won convictions in the "dirty war" fought against Basque separatists, and also has played a role in indicting Basque terrorists.

He also champions the need for the International Criminal Court. At the end of December, former President Clinton signed a treaty to establish the court. If ratified by 60 nations, the treaty would create the first standing court in the world with the power to try people on charges of genocide and other crimes against humanity. (Clinton's signature does not constitute U.S. ratification of the treaty, however.)

An international court may be a difficult idea for people to pay attention to because it is conceived of as an institution that is "far away ­ something that is not near to us," he said.

But he said all people have ties to a global community: Just as people have a stake in a global economy, people share a common humanity.

And while "the 20th century, perhaps, has been one of the darkest, more violent centuries of history," people have made progress toward finding ways to "fight crimes against humanity," he said.

He pointed out that the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) has never been used in trying or punishing such crimes, even though plenty of instances exist ­ in Tibet and in Cambodia, for example ­ where genocide, as the convention defines it, has been committed.

He also pointed to what he considers problem areas of the current treaty but emphasized the need for the international court's creation.

"We cannot go against international crime if we don't have an international set of rules and regulations that establish the basis on which we can act," he said. "We cannot fight against the criminal phenomena so long as ... there is no common base on which to lean."

The next Talking Heads forum, "Cultural Traditions in Latin America," will be presented March 8 by Alicia Ríos of the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela. Ríos is also a Mellon Fellow at Stanford. The respondent will be Professor Julio Ramos of the University of California-Berkeley. Unless otherwise noted, all Talking Heads forums take place from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Room 237 of Pigott Hall (Building 260) every other Thursday.