Peru’s Constitutional Court: Fujimori to be released after controversial ruling

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) will be released in the coming days after the Constitutional Court (TC) issued a ruling Thursday that reverses Fujimori’s 2017 humanitarian pardon. The decision has reopened deep divisions caused by the controversial politician in Peru.

The decision of the Supreme Council, taken with the casting vote of its president, Augusto Ferrero, not only opens the prison doors to the former president, now 83 and sentenced to 25 years in prison for crimes against humanity, but has once again pitted his supporters and opponents against each other.

The government of President Pedro Castillo announced that it would turn to international bodies to reverse the decision, which was met with outrage and rejection from the upper echelons of power.

Amid this controversy, Fujimori could be released from prison next Monday or Tuesday once judicial and legal procedures to implement the ruling are completed, according to his defense lawyer, Cesar Nakazaki.

As the former president’s supporters celebrated the decision, with dozens arriving outside the Lima prison where he is serving his sentence, his eldest daughter, Keiko Fujimori, reiterated that the measure was “justice” and that the family would await “the next steps” for the judicial authority to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision.

The three-time presidential candidate also said that, for now, she would not comment on “the different opinions that have been expressed against the release of her father” but assured that opponents of the measure “are in the right.”

THE COURT’S CONTROVERSIAL RULING.

Ferrero’s dissenting vote ruled on the invalidity of the court order that suspended Fujimori’s pardon, granted in 2017, after the vote on the “habeas corpus” petition that called for the measure passed with three votes in favor and three against.

In this sense, the Supreme Court declared well-founded the appeal of lawyer Gregorio Parco Alarcón against the decision of the Supreme Court, which in 2018 had declared invalid the December 24, 2017 pardon of Fujimori by then-President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (2016-2018).

The judiciary had annulled the pardon because it did not meet legal requirements and was not legally effective, forcing Fujimori to return to the police barracks in eastern Lima, where he is serving his sentence.

The pardon is currently being investigated by the courts, as prosecutors believe it was the result of a negotiation between Kuczynski and Fujimori’s youngest son Kenji, who was a congressman at the time, so that Fujimori supporters would vote against a motion to impeach the then-president.

PUBLIC AND STATE OPPOSITION

The Supreme Court’s decision was also rejected by hundreds of citizens who gathered in Lima’s historic center to peacefully protest with the families of the victims of the crimes for which Fujimori was convicted.

“As relatives of the victims of the Cantuta case in particular and all the cases of Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship, we are outraged by this illegal decision to release him,” former Culture Minister Gisela Ortiz, who is the sister of one of the students kidnapped, tortured and disappeared in 1992 at La Cantuta University in Lima, told Efe.

President Castillo and Prime Minister Aníbal Torres initially rejected the resolution, a position later confirmed from a legal perspective by Deputy Justice Minister Juan Carrasco and Foreign Minister César Landa.

After meeting with the president at the Government Palace, Carrasco announced that the executive branch would “turn to international channels, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), to revise this ruling.”

Landa, a renowned constitutional lawyer who presided over the Constitutional Court between 2006 and 2008, argued that the decision “is not valid because it violates the rulings” of the IACHR Court and therefore “should be overturned” by that court.

Fujimori was convicted as the perpetrator of the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres, perpetrated by the covert military group Colina in 1991 and 1992, respectively, and for the kidnapping of a businessman and a journalist after his coup in 1992.