For his tireless efforts in the fight for the memory, dignity, justice and reparation of all the victims of the coup d’état of 1936, the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship and for his sensitivity, intelligence, commitment and permanent kindness
On Saturday night, October 26, taking advantage of the weekend break, at home and enjoying Serrat’s exciting speech on the occasion of the 2024 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts received, I learned of the death of Ana Messuti. She was a lawyer, a specialist in the philosophy of Criminal Law, a United Nations Official and a Doctor of Law from our Criminal Law Area at the University of Salamanca.
A fervent defender of Universal Justice, Ana Messuti was one of the lawyers who accompanied the victims of Franco’s regime in the so-called “Argentine complaint” against the crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity committed by the Franco dictatorship, always showing a special sensitivity towards the victims and relatives who suffered the atrocities committed against human rights during the four long and endless decades. Ana Messuti considered that the Spanish Amnesty Law of 1977 “transgressed the principles of International Law and the International Covenants related to the matter”. He further stated that “considering prescribed crimes as serious as systematically practiced torture reveals the will not to judge them.”
Since she settled in Madrid, she came frequently to Salamanca – from whose university she obtained her PhD – to actively participate in any conference, seminar, meeting or congress on universal justice and war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity organized by the Area of Criminal Law or by the Legal Clinic of Social Action, both of the University of Salamanca and meetings and tributes of historical memory organized by the association “Salamanca por la Memoria y la Justicia”.
In another vein, Ana Messuti dedicated a good part of her research activity to her critical philosophical reflections on the custodial sentence, which she considered as “the exclusion of social space and time, because the exclusion of social space is equivalent to the deprivation of social time.” The time that passes during the deprivation of liberty, he said, “It is the time of a subject split, not from his body, from which he cannot be split, but from his person in terms of being social, from his power to be, as a possibility open to multiple possibilities.” According to Ana Mesutti, “From that perspective, in this sense, it is much closer to the death penalty than we usually think”. As a scholar of the custodial sentence, we had several in-depth debates on the matter, reaching the conclusion that the prison sentence as it is conceived in practice and in the majority of its current penal systems, should be replaced by others of a different nature, due to their hostile, desocializing and stigmatizing content.
For its part, from the association “Salamanca por la Memoria y la Justicia”, the news of the death of Ana Messuti has caused us immense sadness. For his tireless efforts in the fight for the memory, dignity, justice and reparation of all the victims of the coup d’état of 1936, the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship and for his sensitivity, intelligence, commitment and permanent kindness. Rest in peace, Ana. We will always remember you, dear friend and companion!
#Ana #Messuti #memoriam
