Buenos Aires, Dec 3 (NA) – A Peruvian national, who was charged in the country with bribery, fled for years, and now authorities are questioning his acquittal after the accused returned to Argentina with his case already prescribed.
In mid-November, the Criminal and Correctional Court of 10th Nomination in the city of Cordoba acquitted a person charged with active bribery due to the statute of limitations. In February of this year, an arrest warrant had been issued against him, which could only be executed last November when the accused entered the country from Peru.
According to the resolution accessed by the Argentine News Agency (NA) from the Cordoba Justice portal, upon his arrival in Argentina, "the maximum duration of the penalty for the crime of bribery (six years) had already elapsed, and consequently, there was no alternative but to declare the criminal action extinct."
In the ruling, Judge Carlos Palacio Laje stated that "Article 67 of the Criminal Code does not contemplate flight from justice or an arrest warrant among the acts that interrupt or suspend the course of prescription." Consequently, he considered that the current legal framework generates a distorting effect in this regard.
Laje stated that prescription "constitutes a guarantee against state inactivity and the prolonged uncertainty of the accused," but it loses all reasonableness "when the obstacle to advancing in the process does not stem from state disinterest, but from the conduct of the accused himself."
The judge explained that this is because in this case there was no inactivity on the part of the Justice system; rather, the case reached this point because the accused remained a fugitive and at large: "The passage of time cannot generate a benefit, as it does not respond to a delay attributable to the State but to an evasive attitude of the accused."
Finally, he maintained that "prescription was conceived to limit the inaction of the State, not to reward the disobedience of the accused" and that "incorporating flight from justice as a cause for suspension or interruption of prescription would not imply expanding punitive power, but reaffirming a basic principle of equity: procedural guarantees protect those who submit to the process, not those who evade it."
