Peru annuls ex-president Fujimori’s pardon, orders arrest
LIMA: A Peruvian court annulled ex-president Alberto Fujimori’s pardon for crimes against humanity and ordered the 80-yearold’s immediate arrest, officials said.
The South American country’s justice department said in a statement that the Supreme Court had “issued the arrest and detention orders against former president Fujimori so that he may be re-integrated into the prison establishment”.
He was pardoned last December on humanitarian grounds, but critics said the move was in exchange for Fujimori’s son helping then-president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski avoid impeachment.
Fujimori was 12 years into a 25-year jail sentence handed down for ordering two massacres by death squads between 1991 and 1992.
“This decision is inhuman, it’s unjust,” said his daughter Keiko, leader of the main opposition Popular Force party and seen by many as the heir to Fujimori’s political dynasty. “Today is the saddest day of our lives, it’s painful,” a tearful Keiko told reporters, adding that she had yet to speak to her father since the court decision.
One of Fujimori’s lawyers, Miguel Perez, said on Chile’s RPP radio the decision was subject to appeal.
The pardon, issued by Kuczynski before he was himself brought down by a corruption scandal, triggered a wave of protests by human rights organisations and by victims of Fujimori’s crackdown.
Fujimori, a Peruvian of Japanese descent, has been living in Lima but has been hospitalised four times since his release last December.
After his arrest on Wednesday, he was admitted to a clinic after experiencing a drop in blood pressure and an accelerated heart beat, his doctor, Alejandro Aguinaga, said.
Victims of Fujimori’s crackdown had petitioned the Inter-American Court to demand a judicial review of the process that led to the pardon. Carlos Rivera, a lawyer for the victims, said the decision to annul the pardon was justified.
“Kuczynski’s pardon to Alberto Fujimori has no legal value and therefore he has to return to prison for irregularities in the process,” he said. —