UN hails charges against Brazil colonel

The United Nations says it welcomes the prospect a retired Brazilian army colonel will be prosecuted for abuses during the country's military rule. Prosecutors in Brazil earlier this week said they would charge Sebastiao Curio Rodrigues de Moura with aggravated kidnapping in the disappearance of five members of the Araguaia guerrilla movement who were detained in 1974. A judge must approve the charges before the matter can go to trial. "This is a long-awaited development towards accountability for the hundreds of people who disappeared during the 21-year dictatorship and who remain unaccounted for," Rupert Colville, spokesperson for the Geneva, Switzerland-based Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Friday in a release. The human rights agency said this marked the first time Brazil would prosecute human rights violations committed during the military regimes from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Previous efforts were blocked by interpretations of a 1979 amnesty law. That law was voided in 2010 by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which determined it was invalid and that criminal investigations and prosecutions must proceed. "We are hopeful that the Brazilian judiciary will uphold the fundamental rights of the victims to truth and justice by allowing this very important criminal prosecution to go forward," Colville said.