Human rights organizations in Peru are planning Friday to present a request to the National Magistrates Council to remove Javier Villa Stein from the presidency of the Supreme Court.
The request is to be made by a number of human rights groups, including the well-known Institute for Legal Defense, IDL, and the Association for Human Rights, Aprodeh, according to daily Peru.21.
The organizations are filing 12 charges against Villa Stein, who they accuse of lacking impartiality in a recent questionable ruling.
The request from the human rights defenders is related to the Supreme Court’s recent and controversial decision to lift the accusation of human rights crimes —and thus reduce the prison sentences —of members of a paramilitary death squad that was responsible for the deaths of 25 people during the 1990s.
The Supreme Court, led by Justice Javier Villa Stein, reduced the sentences for the Grupo Colina members, arguing that the killings did not qualify as a crime against humanity.
The Supreme Court’s ruling has been widely condemned by local and international human rights groups, as well as President Ollanta Humala and other high-ranking officials in Peru’s government.
The Grupo Colina, wearing masks and unidentifiable uniforms, machine-gunned 15 people, including an 8-year-old boy, in the courtyard of a tenement building in Lima’s Barrios Altos district in 1991 and kidnapped, tortured and murdered nine students and one professor at La Cantuta University in 1992.
The death squad was also responsible for a series of other assassinations, including the death of union leader Pedro Huilca and of several small farmers in the Santa valley north of Lima, the latter allegedly as a personal request from General Nicolas Hermoza, then commander in chief of the army.
The killings occurred during the state’s offensive against Shining Path rebels, who were equally bloody in their indiscriminate targeting and killing of generally poor peasants and villagers who opposed the Maoist-inspired ideology of its leader, Abimael Guzman.
why is it that the “Human Rights” people….are NEVER THERE when Maoists and Marxists are massacring people……only when the ‘state’ defends itself?
This is just the latest episode of the “Human Rights” groups playing leftist politics….for their OWN personal gain.