Peru court reverses sentence reduction in 1991 massacre
September 29, 2012
RECORDER REPORT
Peru's Supreme Court has rescinded a decision to reduce prison sentences meted out to perpetrators of a 1991 massacre, bowing to an order by Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the chief justice said Friday. The high court's ruling on July 20 had reduced the prison sentences of former president Alberto Fujimori's top intelligence official, Vladimir Montesinos, and other senior military officials linked to the massacre.
They had been found guilty of crimes against humanity in the killing of 15 people, including a minor, in a Lima neighbourhood in November 1991 on suspicion of belonging to the Shining Path guerrilla group. In reducing their sentences, the Supreme Court reclassified the massacre to a crime against human rights, drawing an implicit rebuke from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which on Monday ordered the Peruvian court to reverse itself.
"We are attentive to and respectful of the international order," chief justice Cesar San Martin told RPP radio. "The sentence in question is without effect, has no juridical value or implication. It's definitive, unappealable, unobjectionable. There is nothing to do," San Martin said.
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2012
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