Sergio Micco submitted his resignation to the leadership of the National Institute of Human Rights (INDH), after a group of advisors of the body called for his resignation. Thus ended a conflictive relationship between the agency and the academic who today assures that everything started with prejudices against him and that ended in a “cancellation” towards his management.
“I would say that this started with prejudices against me, and that it ended frankly in an openly cancel culture. I estimate at least six funa campaigns against what I represented,” said Sergio Micco, in an interview with El Mercurio, adding that he surely played against his position against the voluntary interruption of pregnancy as a right.
The former director of the INDH told the morning that “if we continue to make human rights not an ethical minimum, but an ethical maximum where human rights are already true government programs, we are in a serious problem.”
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Sergio Micco resigned just days before the end of his term as director of the INDH. Faced with this, he explained that for 60 days there was a strike by the two guilds of the institute asking him to resign because he declared that human rights violations in Chile were not systematic or that there were no political prisoners. “Then it was 180 days of taking and I didn’t resign. So the highest body of the NHRI is the council. And that higher body was configured in a majority adverse to what I represent. That being the case, I was not going to become an obstacle to the development of a new majority within the council.”
It is worth mentioning that the councilors Constanza Valdés, Yerko Ljubetic, Consuelo Contreras, Francisco Ugás and Lieta Vivaldi, plus the support of Fernado Pairican, who is awaiting his formal appointment, asked for the resignation of Micco, whose term ended on July 29.
“I did not want to continue being an obstacle to relations with the government,” said Sergio Micco, arguing that “obviously I was not a pleasant person for the Executive Branch.”
Micco said he received complaints and pressure to file criminal complaints for 103 cases of disappeared detainees. And he said that of those 103 people, 102 were arrested, that is, they were not disappeared detainees. “Can you imagine that as director of the INDH he would have said that carabineros, in the midst of the state of constitutional exception, were detaining people and making them disappear? I was criticized a lot because I did not talk about the refoundation of the Carabineros, and today the President of the Republic also declares his support for the Carabineros de Chile.”
The former head of the INDH criticized that since January 18 they were asking for a meeting with President Gabriel Boric to discuss the agenda of truth and justice, but that “never happened.” In his opinion, “there were quite a few bad manners.” He commented that “the coup warns” seems to him to be a terrible policy of human relations in general, and in particular within public bodies. “If I have a fundamental objection to an authority, I give advance notice.”
“When you are attacked for the ideas you defend, I consider it even an honor. I fought against a military dictatorship to defend human rights and now to defend principles with an uncovered face. I find it an honor,” he added.
Asked if he will vote Approve or Reject, Micco said that “I cannot be with this draft Constitution.” And he said that “that constitutional proposal, that culture that promotes that all the inhabitants of Chile claim for our individual rights, everything is asked of the State to guarantee it, it will not work.”
“I am concerned that in the draft of the new Constitution this (abortion) is established as a right, or a fundamental guarantee. Because, in my opinion, it has to be defined in a national congress. That they are the representatives of the people who say yes or no, but that it is not established in such a way that the people who do not agree are expelled from the civic community, “concluded Sergio Micco.
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