At a crucial stage, amnesty for the prisoners of the social uprising in Chile – Prensa Latina

Lawyer Jaime Fuentes, one of the promoters of the initiative, reported the day before on Twitter that starting Monday the Senate’s constitutional committee will analyze the amnesty bill and the vote will take place on Wednesday.

Al-Faqih said that he hopes that the text will be approved as it has already happened in two other committees that analyzed it and in this way it moves to the discussion in the plenary session, while the demands for freedom of these people, who are the young majority, increase.

It is possible that about 806 young people will benefit from the amnesty, many of whom are in pretrial detention for nearly two years, according to the number given to the Committee of Initiatives for the Release of Political Prisoners, consisting of family members and activists.

For the promoters of this measure, there is sufficient background and legal arguments for agreeing to the amnesty, because there are hundreds of people who have been in preventive detention for a year and a half, without trials or convictions and even victims of irregular detentions.

The newspaper “Siglo” in this regard, indicated that parliamentary sources confirm that the opposition has the necessary votes to approve the project and advance the freedom of detainees.

Last week, the Constitutional Committee listened to the criteria of the inmates’ families, complaints of ill-treatment and other violations that the detainees were subjected to, as well as the arguments of specialists in the matter in favor of or against the amnesty.

Calls have also increased in the social and political sectors about the need for a political solution to a long-standing problem, and there is no shortage of criticisms of the slow legislative process of the bill that was introduced last December.

Even the members of the Congress who would draft the new constitution, in one of their first actions, agreed to a declaration calling on the government to find a proper and speedy solution to the problem.

However, the day before the Minister of the Interior, Rodrigo Delgado, reiterated the position taken by the Executive, claiming that the project “starts from a false premise, classifying common criminals as political prisoners”.

As he told the conservative daily El Mercurio, a project like this once again violates the victims of violence. Those who have been deprived of their freedom are people who have committed crimes.” He considered that more than an amnesty proposal is an amnesty.

Delgado did not rule out that, depending on what is happening in the National Congress, the government goes to the Constitutional Court to prevent approval of the legislative project.

Memory / rc