IEC-US: PETITIONS FILED WITH THE U.N. ON BEHALF OF ABIMAEL GUZMAN AND ALL PERU’S POLITICAL PRISONERS
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A significant step has been taken in the legal case of Dr. Abimael Guzman and other political prisoners in Peru. On January 10, 1998, two U.S. lawyers for Dr. Abimael Guzman -- Leonard I. Weinglass and Peter Erlinder -- submitted two petitions to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
One petition is on behalf of Abimael Guzman, documenting how his treatment at the hands of the Peruvian authorities is a clear-cut case of arbitrary detention as defined by the UN Working Group. The other petition is on behalf of all the prisoners convicted under the anti-terrorism laws and currently held in Peru’s prisons. The latter petition documents how the very laws and procedures established under Peru’s anti-terrorism laws serve to “legally” enforce the denial of due process and the practice of arbitrary detention against all those arrested under these laws. These petitions call on the UN Working Group to recommend to the Peruvian government that full rights be restored immediately to Dr. Guzman and to all the prisoners who have been convicted of terrorism and treason.
The petitions were submitted to the UN Working Group in anticipation of its investigative trip to Peru which took place during late January and early February of this year. The mandate of this Working Group is to investigate the judicial and legal practices that result in the detention of prisoners. It does not investigate the prison conditions, but rather the procedures used by the authorities to imprison people, in order to determine whether the prisoners’ rights to a fair trial and due process are being respected or whether they are instead being arbitrarily detained by the government authorities. While in Peru, the UN Working Group representatives visited a number of prisons throughout Peru and interviewed prisoners convicted under the anti-terrorism laws. However, they were not allowed by the government to see Dr. Abimael Guzman. The Working Group is expected to issue a report on its visit to Peru. However, as of this writing, the results of the investigation have not yet been released.
The introduction to the petition on behalf of Abimael Guzman states:
The immediate background to the arbitrary detention of Abimael Guzman begins with the April 5, 1992 self-coup by President Alberto Fujimori, who with full backing of the military, closed Congress, abolished Peru's Constitution, and placed the judiciary under executive control after the military assault on all the judicial installation and the consequent plundering and destruction of them. President Fujimori dismissed numerous judges and replaced them with people who directly answer o the executive and who maintain their posts on a provisional basis subject to recall by the executive at any time…In June 1992, the anti-terrorist law Decree Law 25.475 was enacted, and in August 1992 the treason law Decree Law 25.659 was enacted. The first of these laws created the system of "faceless courts" which make secret the identities of judges and prosecutors, eliminating the possibility of accountability of the judiciary before the public.
With their numerous violations of international standards, these laws and the newly established judiciary under direct control of the Executive set the stage for thousands of people to face arbitrary detention at the hands of the government over the last five years.
The case of Abimael Guzman is foremost among these cases of flagrant abuses of national and international standards, and in fact this case was used by the government to set new legal precedent which have since been applied to thousands of others. We will enumerate the violations which have occurred to Dr. Guzman's case.
The petition on Dr. Guzman’s case goes on to document how his was a textbook case of arbitrary detention from the day of his arrest, and how his treatment has been in flagrant violation of numerous international standards. From the beginning, Dr. Guzman was denied access to his lawyer and denied adequate time and facilities to prepare his defense. Fujimori personally ordered that he be tried before a “faceless” military court, despite the fact that under the conditions of the anti-subversive war being carried out by the army, it was impossible for him to receive a fair and impartial trial in a military court. During the trial Dr. Guzman was never given the opportunity to question the witnesses against him nor to defend himself in any way, and the trial consisted almost exclusively of interrogation of Dr. Guzman about his political convictions. Even his lawyer, Dr. Alfredo Crespo, was severely harassed by the authorities and eventually tried and imprisoned under the very same laws used to convict Dr. Guzman.
The cruel isolation that Dr. Guzman has been kept in ever since his trial is also in flagrant violation of international standards and is further proof of the arbitrary character of his detention.
The petition on behalf of all the political prisoners in Peru states that the anti-terrorism laws have produced arbitrary detention on a massive scale. The system of “faceless” courts, where defendants are tried in secret before hooded judges whose identities are never revealed, involved numerous violations of international legal standards and were denounced by every major international human rights organization. The use of “faceless” judges was eventually suspended in October 1997 in response to international pressure, but not before thousands of people were convicted and locked away in Peru’s dungeons—the vast majority of whom remain there to this day. It is not clear exactly what procedures the Peruvian government is now using to try defendants charged with terrorism, but many injustices still persist in the Peruvian judicial system.
The petition states:
In essence the courts and prisons have been used by the government as a means to combat and attempt to defeat its domestic political opposition, under the justification that once someone has been charged or convicted as a “terrorist” any denial of basic human rights becomes acceptable.
Whereas various human rights organizations are calling for the government to review the cases of the prisoners and distinguish between those deemed as “innocent” and those deemed as “guilty,” the petition calls on the UN Working Group to declare that the proceedings against all the prisoners convicted under the anti-terrorism laws have violated international standards and therefore that the convictions of all the prisoners are unlawful.
