2023-04-25 12:50:06
The private defenders of the Mapuche referent Facundo Jones Huala presented another appeal so that the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation admit the claim made unsuccessfully in lower instances and aside for lack of impartiality to federal judge Gustavo Villanuevawhich subrogates the Bariloche court, of the extradition trial to which the Mapuche activist will be subjected again at the request of the Chilean State.
Meanwhile, the deadlines are running and Jones Huala has been detained since the beginning of last February in the federal prison of Esquel after being arrested on January 30, at a home in a neighborhood of El Bolsón by personnel of the Río Negro Police.
The defense of the Mapuche leader convicted by the Chilean Justice wants to propose that he serve the remainder of his sentence in Argentina. This was stated by the lawyer Eduardo Soares, who is one of Jones Huala’s defenders. Gustave Franquet is the other. Both are members of the Association of Lawyers of the Argentine Republic.
Soares recalled that Jones Huala has one year and 4 months left to exhaust the sentence imposed in December 2018 by the Valdivia Oral Criminal Court, which sentenced him to 6 years in prison as the perpetrator of the fire in an inhabited house and also applied another sentence of 3 years and one day in prison for illegal possession of weapons.
The trial court computed in his favor the 1,178 days of preventive detention that Jones Huala served in Argentina and Chile. Consequently, on June 26, 2023, he exhausts the sentence. Jones Huala had agreed to parole in January of last yearbut the Chilean Supreme Court revoked that benefit in February 2022. But the convicted person fled Chile.
BLACK RIVER Soares was asked if, in the event that he has less than a year left on his sentence, it is possible for him to finish serving his sentence in Argentina. “It is what we will try,” replied the defender. “It won’t be that simple or easy,” he clarified. He explained that the legislation allows it, “but it is debatable. The jurisprudence is not peaceful.
The defense appeals to all available resources so that Jones Huala is not extradited because they allege that he is a political prisoner.
They accuse “lack of impartiality” of the judge
They challenged Villanueva because they warned that there had been intervened in the first extradition trial against the Mapuche leader, which took place in February 2018 in a gym in Bariloche, under an unprecedented security deployment of federal forces.
Villanueva then subrogated the federal court of Bariloche and issued the sentence on March 5, 2018 that declared Jones Huala’s estrangement from Chile admissible. The defenders of that moment challenged the Supreme Court, which confirmed the ruling in August of that year. For this reason, in September he was extradited to be tried by the Chilean Justice that sentenced him.
Last week, Franquet and Soares filed an appeal against the decision that the substitute judge of the federal court of Zapala, Ezequiel Andreani, issued on April 12 last and rejected the challenge against Villanueva.
They filed the appeal directly before the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation because the Federal Chamber of Appeals of Roca warned them weeks ago that this was the only possible way to claim.
In the appeal they insisted on the precedent “Llerena” of the Supreme Court to found the appeal, which established jurisprudence in the matter of challenges for lack of impartiality.
The defenders argued that Judge Andreani “uses an out-of-context reading of the Llerena case and others directly related to what Law 24,767 on International Cooperation in Criminal Matters explicitly establishes as an extradition trial.”
They indicated that Andreani “endorses this interpretation and reinforces it with the assumption that we would be, no longer before a trial but before” an extradition procedure, which by its nature is restrictive and autonomous.
Jones Huala claims to be “politically persecuted”
“In this new trial, this defense will try to prove that, precisely, what finally happened in the requesting country comes to demonstrate the political persecution background to the charges, conviction and treatment, including the decision to deny him parole, who suffered the one required in that country». Jones Huala’s defenders warned.
They recalled that in March, when they asked Villanueva to refrain from intervening, they told him that clearly “he will be conditioned in his private jurisdiction by the responsibility he assumed” in the first extradition trial.
“We are before a federal judge who, when deciding on the first extradition request, pronounces on events, attitudes and the functioning of Chilean State bodies that must now be discussed, in light of the experience lived by Mr. Jones Huala after be extradited,” they said.
“In other words, Mr. Judge Villanueva has already issued an opinion (and it is even more relevant that he did so in a sentence), on the substantive issues that must be dealt with in this new Trial,” they highlighted.
«In fact, it goes without saying, it will be Judge Villanueva who will decide on our probationary offer. And in the very argument that he used to refuse to inhibit himself, it is clear that, from his point of view, there is very little or nothing to debate, “they added.
“But in addition, all that has been said shows that, although these are two separate trials (one, extradition to try; the other, extradition to serve a sentence), there is such an important degree of homogeneity between the two that the situation can be equated to that contemplated in the Rules of Mallorca, when dealing with the duty to guarantee impartiality, “they argued.
And they stressed that these rules establish that “Those who have intervened previously may not be part of the Courtin any way, or in another function or in another instance in the same case”.
«We maintain that Judge Villanueva adopted a hypothesis of what would happen to Mr. Jones Huala in Chile in his ruling that declared the extradition admissible (perhaps because he did not assume that what happened there would be “matter of decision later”) and That means, neither more nor less, that the doubt that this party has about its objective impartiality is reasonable and well-founded and that is how the Chamber of Cassation should consider it, “they stated.
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