The Constitutional Court of Peru (TC) ordered this Thursday to release the former president Alberto Fujimori, sentenced to 25 years in prison for human rights abuses, upon restoring a pardon granted in December 2017 and annulled in October 2018, a judicial source reported.
“TC declared the petition for habeas corpus founded” in favor of Fujimori, 83 years old and who ruled between 1990 and 2000, which allows his release in the coming days, the source told AFP, who asked to remain anonymous. . The decisions of this court are unappealable.
After being extradited from Chile in 2007, Alberto Fujimori was sentenced for the massacres of Barrios Altos (15 dead, including an 8-year-old boy) and La Cantuta (10 dead), perpetrated by a military squad during his government.
Constitutional Court of Peru tilted the balance in favor of Fujimori
The vote in the court, made up of six magistrates, produced a tie of three votes in favor and three once morest accepting habeas corpus. But the president of the TC, Augusto Ferrero, tipped the balance in favor of Fujimori because his vote is counted as double.
“The rule says that when there is a tie, the president has a double vote or quality vote,” the judicial source explained to AFP.
Fujimori is the only inmate of the small Barbadillo prison, in the headquarters of the Directorate of Special Police Operations, in eastern Lima, to which he returned on Monday following spending 11 days in a clinic for heart problems.
There he grows flowers, paints oil paintings and receives family visits.
