Madrid - Pressure is mounting in Spain to settle accounts with the 1939-75 dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, with critics seeing government measures to rehabilitate his victims as half-hearted.

The government "forgot the state's responsibility to investigate human rights violations," the human rights group Amnesty International charged, but government representatives stressed its commitment to redressing the injustices of the Franco era.

In 2007, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist government passed the Law of Historic Memory, aimed at restoring dignity to leftists killed during the 1936-39 civil war and Franco's subsequent dictatorship.

Hailed as the first serious attempt to make a clean break with the dictatorship, the law was watered down from its original version to make it more acceptable to the opposition conservative People's Party (PP), which feels delving into the Franco era would revive old social divisions.

In its attempts to toe the fine line between victims calling for justice and the PP, which grew partly out of Francoist roots, the government was dragging its feet in putting the law into effect, far-left critics claimed.

Franco's military uprising against the legal, leftist republican government touched off the civil war in which more than half a million people were killed on both sides.

The war was a prelude to the fight against fascism in World War II, with thousands of international volunteers joining the republicans against Franco's right-wing nationalists who were backed by Germany and Italy.

After Franco won the war, tens of thousands of his opponents are believed to have died in reprisals, prisons and labour camps.

The dictatorship paid tribute to nationalist victims, while an estimated 30,000 republicans were forgotten in unmarked mass graves.

After Franco died in 1975, his collaborators were granted a collective amnesty in an attempt to heal a divided nation.

Spain never made a judicial break with the dictatorship, and the Law of Historic Memory does not clearly include the possibility of revising summary verdicts handed out by Francoist tribunals.

The government has not yet put into effect some of the key provisions contained in the law, such as establishing a map of mass graves, which would allow citizens' associations exhuming republican remains to continue giving them adequate burials.

The bones of more than 4,000 people have already been dug up by associations which feel the task should be taken over by the authorities.

The search for remains continued Wednesday, with the bones of six people unearthed from a site near where ten people had been executed in the northern village of Izagre in 1936.

Francoist statues and other tributes have been removed from some cities, but others retain them, and the government has not pressed all municipalities to comply with the law, the daily El Pais reported.

A National Court judge finally took action on a related issue, requesting information on buried victims and disappearances from parishes, municipalities, ministries and the Valley of the Fallen, Franco's imposing mausoleum near Madrid where some 30,000 civil war victims also lie interred.

Judge Baltasar Garzon, who has also pursued former Latin American dictators for human rights violations, was believed to want to encourage the government to establish a census of Franco's victims, whose number has never been officially determined.

Some regions and historians immediately offered to supply Garzon with the information they had.

Nearly 100 survivors of the Francoist repression or relatives of those who were killed are also seeking an official recognition of their suffering.

The Law of Historic Memory has provisions for such a recognition, though it does not include financial compensation.

The attempts to deal with Franco's legacy are dividing Spain again, with PP leader Mariano Rajoy warning against "reopening wounds of the past."

Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba rejected such charges, saying investigating the Franco era would allow wounds to heal. (dpa)