translated from Spanish: At 77, lawyer and academic José Zalaquett Daher died

Lawyer and teacher José Zalaquett Daher died this Saturday at the age of 77. The lawyer stood out as one of the first to bring appeals on behalf of those arrested by Pinochet’s military dictatorship in the days after the coup and was a defender of prisoners subjected to court-martial. For this work he was arrested by Agents of The Dina and then exiled.
Abroad, between 1979 and 1982 he was head of the Executive Committee of Amnesty International. Back in Chile he was appointed to the group that made up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, known as the Rettig Commission, which established the historical truth of what happened to the missing and executed during the military dictatorship.
Between 2001 and 2004 he joined the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and continued with a long academic career as a professor of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Chile. In 2004 he was honored with the National Prize for Humanities and Social Sciences for his “contribution to the protection of the rights of individuals and ethics in politics”
He received an honorary doctorate from the universities of Notre Dame and City University of New York. During his life he surpassed three cancer diagnoses and in his later years lived with Parkinson’s disease

Original source in Spanish