The ruling by a British magistrate last Friday that the former Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, should be extradited to Spain to face 35 charges of torture is only one more step in a very convoluted legal journey. But it is a step in the right direction.
The ruling has included dozens of new charges from the Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzon, which counterbalances General Pinochet's successful move to have many other charges withdrawn on purely procedural grounds. If his lawyers choose to appeal, as they probably will, it could still be many months before a final decision is reached in Britain. General Pinochet is enjoying all the rights and guarantees of a complex legal system, rights which were totally denied to the victims of his regime.
Despite the judicial complexity, the moral and political issues concerning the case are straight-forward.
The fact that General Pinochet has first been brought to book outside his own country is not the best scenario for such a prosecution. But that situation has come about through the actions of the general himself. It was he who decreed, from a position of absolute and illegitimate power, that Chile could only return to democracy if he and his henchmen were granted immunity for all the crimes committed under his dictatorship. Faced with a choice between no democracy at all, and a democracy under the tutelage of an anti-democratic military establishment, an intimidated Chilean electorate chose the latter. But no fair observer can claim that this was a free choice.
General Pinochet's current sympathisers in Europe include, rather disturbingly, democratic politicians ranging from the former British Conservative prime minister, Baroness Thatcher, to the former Spanish Socialist prime minister, Mr Felipe Gonzalez. They have argued that the international legal action against the general threatens the consolidation of Chilean democracy.
Mr Gonzalez has said that the Spanish transition from Francoist dictatorship would have been endangered by such outside "interference". This is an ingenuous argument, since the Spanish transition was not conducted under the tutelage of General Franco, and was only made possible by the dictator's death.
Baroness Thatcher's defence, at last week's Tory conference, of the general as the victim of "a judicial kidnapping" and "police state" tactics is an Orwellian inversion of reality. It is also an extraordinary slur on both the British and Spanish legal systems. Both, indeed, have their flaws, though Baroness Thatcher never noticed anything wrong with British justice in the past. But both are infinitely preferable to the kind of kidnapping and police state tactics of which General Pinochet stands accused.
The man who once boasted that not a leaf moved in Chile without his knowledge is now suddenly blithely ignorant of the notorious activities of his immediate subordinates - some of whom are currently giving damning evidence against him to Chilean magistrates.