While Peru contemplates partially rejecting the authority of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Ministry of Justice has decided to shine a little transparency on the issue by publishing on its website information about human rights cases filed against the country.
The information will include updates on the current process of the charges, Justice Minister Victor Garcia Toma told state news agency Andina.
“All of this information we can now make available on the Web page for all citizens to have a clear idea who is owed, how much is owed, what has happened with the charges and what is the current state of the people involved in these abominable crimes,” Garcia Toma said.
According to Andina, the Peruvian state has been fined a total of $30.9 million by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. It has paid approximately $22.1 million and still owes some $8.87 million.
Many of the Peruvian cases that have been brought before the Costa Rica-based court date back to the 1980’s and 1990’s during the conflict between the Maoist Shining Path, leftist MRTA rebels and Peruvian security forces.
Peru returned to the human rights court’s jurisdiction in January 2001 — a major step in restoring the nation’s international credibility after former President Alberto Fujimori’s authoritarian government crumbled under the weight of mounting corruption scandals.
Fujimori had pushed through legislation in July 1999 to withdraw Peru from the court’s jurisdiction after the tribunal ordered the country to retry in civilian courts four Chileans convicted of terrorism by secret military courts. The four were accused of running a kidnapping and murder squad for the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA.
President Alan García’s government is flirting with again challenging Peru’s treaty obligations to adhere to the rulings of the Costa Rica-based human rights court, the judicial arm of the Organization of American States.
García’s Cabinet chief, Javier Velásquez, has called for rejecting the court’s jurisdiction in terrorism cases, particularly when the nation is ordered to pay reparations stemming from terrorism convictions in Peruvian courts.
The issue blew up in the headlines amid controversy over the conditional release in May of American activist Lori Berenson, who served nearly 15 years of a 20-year sentence for collaborating with the MRTA. Berenson’s parole was appealed by prosecutors and she could be sent back to prison depending on a local court ruling expected within the next two weeks.
The president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Diego García-Sayán, called the heated debate about human rights reparations “a slanderous campaign.”
“This campaign to discredit the Court is meant to debase the concept of human rights and to make the Court out to be a supposed defender of terrorism,” he told veteran Peruvian investigative reporter Ángel Páez.
In December 2004, the Inter-American human rights court upheld the conviction Berenson received in a 2001 civilian retrial. But the human rights court also ordered Peru to compensate Berenson and her family for her illegal military trial by hooded judges who condemned her in 1996 to life in prison, as well as for the inhumane conditions she endured in the late 1990s during her incarceration in Yanamayo Prison.
That ruling canceled out the $30,000 fine imposed on Berenson as part of her 2001 civilian court sentence. Peru was also ordered to pay her parents $30,000 in compensation for legal expenses unnecessarily incurred defending their daughter during her illegal military court trial.
