PERU: TOP COURT HAS STRUCK DOWN SOME OF EX-PRESIDENT ALBERTO FUJIMORI'S TOUGH ANTI-TERROR LAWS

Record ID: 645862

  • Title: PERU: TOP COURT HAS STRUCK DOWN SOME OF EX-PRESIDENT ALBERTO FUJIMORI'S TOUGH ANTI-TERROR LAWS
  • Date: 5th January 2003
  • Summary: (W1) LIMA, PERU (JANUARY 03, 2003) (REUTERS) SLV PAN EXTERIORS OF COURT HOUSE; SCU COURT SIGN (2 SHOTS) MV COURT PRESIDENT, JAVIER ALVA ORLANDINI, ENTERING NEWS CONFERENCE (SOUNDBITE) (Spanish) ALVA ORLANDINI SAYING "This has been debated for several weeks. It is about a very delicate subject matter of enormous importance for Peru." WIDE OF NEWS CONFERENCE (SOUNDBITE) (Spanish) ALVA ORLANDINI SAYING "The Court as the guardian of the constitutionality and of human rights, that includes the rights of Peruvians, no one who has been tried or sentenced will walk free." SLV PAN UNIDENTIFIED COURT SCENE
  • Embargoed: 20th January 2003 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: LIMA, PERU
  • Country: Peru
  • Topics: Domestic Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVAAIB3XK5G75LLHKKPYU8DXVDU6
  • Story Text: In what it called "very delicate subject matter of enormous importance for Peru," Peru's top court has struck down some of ex-President Alberto Fujimori's tough anti-terror laws, potentially paving the way for top rebel leaders and hundreds of others to be granted retrials.
    The 60-page ruling, which Court President Javier Alva Orlandini said brought Peru fully in line with international human rights requirements, came after the court's seven judges pored over the fine print of the 1992 laws for weeks.
    The ruling was in response to a petition from 5,000 people, mostly relatives of detainees, calling for four laws to be declared unconstitutional. Full details were to be released later after the court notified the petitioners and Congress.
    Although a flood of retrials was expected, the case of Lori Berenson, a New Yorker jailed in Peru for 20 years on terrorism charges, was not likely to be among them.
    Fujimori, fired in 2000 at the height of a corruption scandal, signed the four legislative decrees after a so-called self-coup in 1992 in which he temporarily closed Congress.
    Their draconian remit -- the laws helped give Peru one of Latin America's worst human rights records -- allowed summary trials of rebel suspects, sometimes by hooded military judges.
    Fujimori, who is in self-imposed exile in Japan on the run from human rights abuse charges, defended the laws on his Web site on Friday, saying they had been necessary to control the "hell" of rebel wars. Some 30,000 died and 7,000 disappeared at the hands of rebels or state forces in the 1980s and 1990s.
    "That is the sad sensation that is left with me to see how they consider unconstitutional the anti-terror laws of the Fujimori government," he said in a taped message to supporters.
    Peru has some 2,500 people jailed on terror charges but has pardoned several hundred who were wrongly imprisoned.
    "No one who has been tried or sentenced will walk free,"
    Alva Orlandini said adding those sentenced would have the possibility of a trial with all the guarantees established by the constitution.
    The decree which was struck down allowed suspects to be tried for treason, something Fujimori vehemently defended.
    "All terrorist acts are treason," he said on his Web site.
    The court also found life sentences unconstitutional but stopped short of eliminating them. Instead, it ordered Congress, which now has the task of updating Peru's anti-terror laws, to legislate for a revision of sentences after 30 years served.
    Human rights activists and jurists say it will trigger a flood of retrials, including those of rebel leaders like Abimael Guzman, head of the Shining Path group that was one of Latin America's bloodiest insurgencies at its height and remains on an official U.S. list of terror organisations.
    But Alva Orlandini said he he did not think it applied to Berenson, an American serving 20 years for collaboration with the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA.
    Berenson, 33, was jailed for life as an MRTA leader by a military court in 1996, but her conviction was overturned in 2000 and a civilian retrial last year sentenced her to 20 years for the lesser crime of terrorist collaboration. The law under which she was convicted at that trial has not been thrown out, although the court has challenged some aspects of it.
    Berenson says she is innocent but Peru's Supreme Court upheld the civilian court sentence on appeal. Her case is currently before the region's top rights court in Costa Rica.
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