Gonzalo Boye

Who is Gonzalo Boye?

Gonzalo Boye is a human rights lawyer, based in Spain, notable for trying to use Spanish law to charge Bush administration officials for their roles in war crimes committed against citizens or residents of Spain while the US held them in extrajudicial detention. Boye was born in Chile.

Many nations allow war crime charges to be laid against non-citizens, and non-residents, when the countries where they lived when the war crimes were committed has failed to initiate an effective inquiry. Spain has a tradition of being more aggressive than other nations, famously trying to extradite Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet from Britain. In 2009 Boye tried to initiate extradition of six former officials from the Presidency of George W. Bush.

Andrew C. McCarthy, writing in the National Review asserted that Boye earned his law degree when he was in prison for playing a role in the political kidnapping of Emiliano Revilla.

Boye was one of four individuals profiled in the award winning documentary The Guantanamo trap. The movie challenges whether Boye was fairly convicted for the kidnapping. According to Deutsche Welle Boye was "a victim of police torture himself".