Argentina: Perpetrators want to study

IPS has picked up on a very interesting story from Argentina, where some "dirty war" criminals want to be allowed to take part in a prisoner study programme run by the University of Buenos Aires - a state institution which itself lost many faculty members and students during the dictatorship. Current faculty members are refusing to teach the four prisoners in question: Carlos Jurio, Juan Carlos Rolón, Adolfo Donda and Carlos Guillermo Suárez Mason [son of Guillermo Suárez Mason].

So, the prisoners have the right to receive an education, but the teachers have the right to refuse to provide it: an impasse. The university authorities are considering the situation, and the prisoners could decide to take further legal action as well.

I completely sympathise with the individuals who wish to have nothing to do with these mass murderers. However, I also have to agree with the founder of the study programme:

Interviewed by IPS, the founder of the UBA XXII programme, B.Ed. Marta Laferrière, said, “denying the right to education to a person who the justice system has sentenced to jail is a very hard decision.”
[...]“We’re not judges. I can be outraged by certain crimes, but it is not the place of the university to be pointing fingers,” she said.
[...] She agreed, however, that teachers must be allowed to exercise their right to “conscientious objection” and refuse to teach them. But the university cannot deny them the service, she said.

Prison Study Programme Shuns Argentine “Dirty War” Criminals (IPS)