The Inter-American Court on Human Rights has given Peru four months to review the presidential pardon granted to Alberto Fujimori six months ago, and to present its findings to the Court by October 29 this year.
The IACHR’s ruling in June follows a hearing to discuss whether or not the decision to pardon Fujimori complies with the constitution and the law, particularly considering the mass murder cases that led to Fujimori’s 2009 trial and conviction.
The Court has set out guidelines to evaluate the pardon case. These include the fact that Fujimori has not paid the civil damages and also that he has only served 10 years of his 25-year sentence. The Court also requests a full review of the prison medical board’s decision regarding Fujimori’s failing health, which served as grounds for President Pedro Pablo Kuczynksi’s decision to pardon Fujimori on Christmas Eve in 2017.
More importantly, the IACHR rules that Peru “has not fully complied with the obligation to investigate, charge, and if applicable, punish” the direct perpetrators in the mass murder cases of La Cantuta and Barrios Altos. Many of the alleged perpetrators have not yet been brought to trial.
Both these cases, for which Fujimori was charged and found guilty of authorizing and abetting, occurred in the first two years of his administration when Shining Path terrorism was at its peak. In the Barrios Altos case, a masked military death squad in 1991 gunned down 16 people, including two women and a nine-year-old boy, at a neighborhood fund-raising barbecue in the inner courtyard of a tenement. In 1992, the same death squad made a pre-dawn raid at the teachers’ university at La Cantuta, taking nine students and a professor. The victims were tortured and killed and only some belongings and parts of their bodies have been recovered.
During a public hearing in March in Bogota, the president of the Inter-American Court, Justice Margarette May Macaulay, said she understood the families of the victims of these cases would perceive the Fujimori pardon as “a slap in the face” from the government. If Fujimori was seriously ill there could have been other decisions, Macaulay said, which would also have been a slap in the face for the vicitms but not as grave as a pardon.
For a full reconciliation in Peru “there has to be respect for the suffering of the victims and of the families,” Macaulay said.
The IACHR decision to make Peru carry out its own evaluation, on whether or not Fujimori should have been pardoned, has made the judiciary uncomfortable. The courts would have preferred being handed a definitive ruling, rather than face the political fallout whatever their findings.
“The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has opted for a salomonic formula,” said the president of the Judiciary, Duberli Rodriguez, who added that he had expected a firmer decision from the Court. “They could have said directly whether (the pardon) was a transgression or not.” Instead, “they have thrown the ball back into the court of Peru’s constitutional and ordinary justice. . . they’ve returned the ball to the judges in Peru.”
Some people have VERY short memories.
Typical leftist stuff….the “Human Rights” of Communist Terrorists and their supporters…ALWAYS seem to trump the “Human Rights” of the thousands massacred by those same Communist Terrorists and their University “useful idiots”….among them those “students” and their professor who set the truck bombs that left a gap (and a memorial park) at the corner of Schell and Larco in Miraflores, bringing down an occupied apartment building. It wasn’t THAT long ago.
Sympathies of leftists everywhere….are for the poor, misunderstood communists….who, after all, only wanted to “liberate” those people……and “liberated” them of their lives and freedom, including “rape camps” in the jungle to make “new soldiers” of the children of kidnapped, raped and unwillingly impregnated women. Lovely people. In comparison….Alberto Fujimori is a “saint”, and deserves his freedom.
If not for Fujimori, the economy would still be wrecked, the communists would be in charge as in Venezuela, and we would still be in a “hot” war with Ecuador. Leave the old man alone.