Inter-American Court asks Guatemala not to release convicted soldiers

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — The Inter-American Court of Human Rights on Monday ordered the State of Guatemala to halt the application of a local Constitutional Court ruling ordering the release of soldiers convicted of war crimes.

“To prevent irreparable damage to the right of access to justice for the victims of the Molina Thiessen vs. Guatemala, refrain from executing the decision issued by the Constitutional Court,” said the Inter-American Court in a ruling dated March 24 and made public on Monday in San José, Costa Rica, the entity’s headquarters.

The Molina Theissen case refers to the forced disappearance in 1981 of the boy Marco Antonio Molina Theissen, then 14 years old, and the aggravated rape of his sister Emma Molina Theissen. Three soldiers were sentenced.

But on March 6, the Guatemalan Constitutional Court (CC) favored Francisco Luis Gordillo Martínez, Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas and Manuel Benedicto Lucas García, three high-ranking soldiers who were sentenced to between 33 and 58 years of imprisonment with an amparo. prison for serious crimes against the Molina Theissen brothers.

The court ruling argued that their state of health and advanced age should be considered to give them the benefit of releasing them in a new resolution, after the negative ruling in another instance.

The approach of the Inter-American Court now is that the CC ruling came before that international court could “adequately evaluate the request for provisional measures” by the victims at its next session in the 157th Regular Period of Sessions to be held from April 17 to 29, 2023.

The military were sentenced in 2018 for crimes against the duties of humanity and forced disappearance and rape with aggravated sentence. According to the Inter-American Court, three of the four convicted soldiers are confined in the Military Hospital with coercive measures and that several times they have requested house arrest instead of prison, requests that have been denied.

The sentence against the military came after the same Inter-American Court condemned the State of Guatemala for a lack of justice for decades against the Molina Theissen family.

In the ruling of the Inter-American Court, it explains that the convicts have filed appeals against the sentence, but that they have not been resolved because the convicts themselves have filed other additional appeals. The Court said that it had previously identified this modality as a “common structural obstacle” in criminal proceedings for serious human rights violations that occurred during the armed conflict in Guatemala.

During the 36-year war in Guatemala (1960-1996) between the leftist guerrillas and the Army, a United Nations report on what happened in the country reported that 200,000 people died and another 45,000 were disappeared, blaming 97% of the Army and paramilitaries and the other 3% of the victims to the guerrillas.

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