OneWorld.net (U.S.)

WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb 2 (OneWorld) - In a major test of free expression for defenders of human rights, a court in Guatemala has cleared a leading activist for children's rights of criminal defamation.

A number of international human rights groups had earlier called for a dismissal of the case which could have sent Bruce Harris, the British director of Casa Alianza, to prison for as much as five years.

Instead Harris was acquitted by the judge in the case who said the evidence failed to establish that Harris had defamed Susana Luarca Saracha de Umana, the spouse of the president of the Guatemalan Supreme Court at the time, when he accused her in a 1997 press conference of exercising "undue influence" over government officials in facilitating international adoptions. Luarca said she would appeal the trial judge's ruling.

Harris, whose group was one of several that publicize abuses in Guatemala's adoption industry, said the verdict rendered Friday was a major victory for children's rights.

"It is not me who has won this case," he said. "Those who won are the people who want to resolve the social problems that affect the children of this country."

Guatemala's adoption industry mushroomed during the 1990's to a point where the small Central American nation has the highest per capita rate of foreign adoptions in the world. Nearly 3,000 Guatemalan children were adopted by foreigners last year, according to Casa Alianza, which is best known in Central America for its advocacy on behalf of the thousands of homeless children who live on the streets of Central America's towns and cities.

Friday's verdict was the second major court victory for human rights groups since Guatemala's new president, Oscar Berger, was inaugurated Jan. 14.

Two weeks ago, the Guatemalan Supreme Court reinstated the conviction of a former high-ranking military officer for the 1990 murder of a prominent anthropologist, Myrna Mack Chang, who was investigating massacres committed by the Guatemalan army in the early 1980s against Mayan Indian communities.

The judgment was hailed as an unprecedented breakthrough in the struggle to make military officers accountable for human rights abuses during the country's 30-year civil war which ended with a UN-mediated peace accord in 1996. It was the first time that a military officer accused of abuses has failed to escape criminal sanction.

The Mack case has already spurred hope that Berger presidency may signal a greater government commitment to protect human rights and human rights defenders in Guatemala. Since his inauguration, he has appointed several prominent activists to governmental commissions, including Frank La Rue and 1992 Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchu.

La Rue, who serves on the government's human rights commission, told BBC Friday that he was "delighted" with Harris' acquittal.

Casa Alianza has published dozens of reports about the plight of Central America's street children, including their killings by vigilantes and police and their exploitation by "sex tourism" and child pornographers, many of them from North America and Europe.

The group has won widespread acclaim for its work.

This most recent case, however, dealt with the controversial adoption trade in Guatemala, a country that suffers shockingly high poverty rates and wide gaps between rich and poor.

The pervasive poverty is a major reason why the adoption trade has become so important; according to some estimates it adds as much as $45 million a year to the nation's gross income.

Adoptive parents pay an average of $15,000 to $20,000 per child, excluding travel expenses. Guatemalan attorneys routinely earn about $5,000 per adoption, many of which are arranged as well through established adoption agencies.

About 85 percent of Guatemala's adopted children go to American parents, making Guatemala the third-largest source of foreign adoptions in the U.S., behind Russia and China.

While most adoptions are legal, the trade has attracted all manner of abuses, from outright kidnapping to more subtle methods of persuading or tricking expectant or actual mothers to give up their babies.

Several years ago, the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City issued new, more stringent rules regarding the issuance of immigrant visas for adoptions to ensure that the adoptions were carried out with the full consent of the birth parents. At the same time, the UN Special Rapporteur on Children charged that adoptions in Guatemala had made children "an object of trade and commerce" and denounced its adoptions laws as the region's weakest.

In response to growing domestic and international concern, the Guatemalan government also began implementing the Hague Convention, which, among other steps, eliminates private adoptions in order to curb abuses. But attorneys have challenged the procedures in court.

Children's activists are hoping that the Berger government will support pending legislation that would make the Hague Convention into national law.

The case against Harris arose at a time when abuses in the adoption system were particularly widespread, and Umana was among several other lawyers named in criminal accusations related to child trafficking that was filed after a joint investigation carried out by Guatemala's attorney general's office and Casa Alianza.

Her action against Harris was made possible in 1999, however, when Guatemala's Constitutional Court ruled that only journalists are entitled to freedom of expression under Guatemala's criminal defamation law.

To international rights groups, the case marked a major test of both freedom of expression and the ability of rights defenders to carry out their work in Central America's most populous nation.

"Mr. Harris is one of the foremost defenders of children's rights, and it is imperative that he is able to fully exercise his right to freedom of expression in order to continue his crucial work," said Neil Hicks, of the Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights before the case went to trial. "The work of Casa Alianza and Bruce Harris in raising global awareness of violations of children's rights is recognized and highly respected internationally."

Amnesty International also objected to the prosecution, noting that "the use of criminal defamation charges against those who expose human rights abuses and issues of social concern in Guatemala is yet another form of persecution of human rights defenders."

"In the past," the London-based-group said before the trial, "criminal defamation laws have frequently been used by authoritarian governments in some countries of the Americas region to intimidate and silence critics and government opponents or to pressure human rights activists into dropping or desisting from pursuing reports of human rights violations."