Lima. The Bar Association of the Peruvian capital has filed a complaint with the Constitutional Court against a recent law that provides for the statute of limitations for crimes against humanity committed before 2002.
The lawsuit argues that the so-called “impunity law” and “covert amnesty” for perpetrators of state crimes “violates fundamental rights, such as the right to the truth, intrinsically linked to the principle of human dignity” established by the Peruvian Constitution.
The law benefits the vast majority of perpetrators of massacres, torture and disappearances recorded during the so-called internal conflict (1980-2000), several of whom have asked to benefit from the law.
The suit invokes the State’s duty to guarantee the full observance of human rights and asks the court to declare the law unconstitutional.
It also notes that the law violates the principles laid down in the Charter of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal that tried Nazi war criminals and which, it adds, defined the main categories of international crimes: crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“These crimes, which represent an attack on human dignity and fundamental rights, must be punished firmly, regardless of the time elapsed,” the group of lawyers maintains.
It underlines the importance of the imprescriptibility of crimes against humanity and war crimes as a fundamental principle of international law that ensures that these crimes cannot be exempt from prosecution and punishment by the passage of time.
Several requests by those accused of these crimes to be released or to have the proceedings against them annulled have been rejected by judges who apply the criterion that the law is inapplicable because the Peruvian State has signed international conventions that commit it to prosecute crimes against humanity regardless of when they were committed.
#Lawyers #file #suit #impunity #law #Peru
– 2024-09-18 04:47:58
