Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, was arrested in London on October 17, 1998, on a warrant from the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, who wanted him extradited to face charges over the torture and killings carried out under his rule. Pinochet was in a private hospital, recovering from back surgery, and he was detained there, which was how a man who had believed himself untouchable found himself under guard in a London clinic.
He had ruled Chile long. He had seized power in a coup in 1973 that overthrew the elected president Salvador Allende, and his government had killed or made disappear thousands of people, and he had stepped down in 1990 under an arrangement that left him in charge of the army and then a senator for life, with an amnesty written for his own side. The Spanish warrant, based on the universal jurisdiction that Spanish courts claimed over crimes against humanity, was meant to break through all of that.
The case ran sixteen months. Britain's courts went back and forth on whether a former head of state could claim immunity, and the House of Lords ruled that he could be extradited, and then the home secretary ruled on his fitness to stand trial, and in March 2000 he was sent back to Chile on medical grounds. He never faced trial in Spain, and the Chilean courts eventually charged him at home, where the cases were still running when he died in 2006.
The arrest changed the law. It was the first time a former head of state had been held in one country on charges brought in another, and the principle it established, that there is no comfortable immunity for the crimes of a government, has been cited in every case since, from the former leaders of the Balkans to the men tried for crimes in Africa. Pinochet went home a free man in one sense, and in another he never got out from under the arrest.