Peru: They annul the 15-year prison sentence of former President Ollanta Humala and give way to his release

“It has been resolved to declare the annulment of the entire criminal process carried out against Ollanta Moisés Humala Tasso,” reads the ruling of the Constitutional Court (TC) dated July 15.

The court used the same reasoning for which nine months ago it ordered the shelving of another investigation against the current president, Keiko Fujimori, who was investigated for the same crime and for whom the prosecution requested 35 years in prison. Humala and Fujimori were accused of having received illicit money for their respective presidential campaigns in 2011 and 2016.

In a resolution issued Thursday night, the country’s highest court in constitutional matters indicated thatno one can be punished for something that, when it occurred, was not a crime. According to the judges, the accusation against Humala for allegedly keeping money of illicit origin to finance his 2006 and 2011 campaigns is conduct that, until 2016, was not a crime in Peru. On April 15, 2025, the National Superior Court sentenced Humala and his wife, Nadine Heredia, to 15 years in prison for money laundering during the presidential campaigns of 2006 and 2011. That day, Humala was present in Court, where he was arrested and imprisoned. But his wife did not attend and sought asylum in Brazil with his 15-year-old son.

In their ruling, the judges of the National Superior Court maintained that Humala and his wife received nearly three million dollars in illegal contributions of the Brazilian company Odebrecht and the government of then Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (1999-2013).

Odebrecht’s corruption plot in Latin America consisted of a large-scale structured system of bribery promoted by the Brazilian construction company through its “Structured Operations Department”, through which it paid hundreds of millions of dollars to presidents, senior officials and political candidates from at least 12 countriesto win multimillion-dollar public works contracts and secure government favors.

Revealed from the investigation of Operation Lava Jato in Brazil, the scandal unleashed massive judicial investigations throughout the region that led to the dismissal, imprisonment and conviction of multiple political leaders, as well as the annulment of various judicial processes and paralyzed infrastructures.

Wilfredo Pedraza, Humala’s lawyer, told local radio RPP that the annulment decreed by the Constitutional Court will mean the freedom of the former president “and the filing of that criminal process.” Humala “has been detained for 15 months for a situation that is not a crime,” he added.

Humala and his wifewere preventively imprisoned between 2017 and 2018 at the request of the prosecution to avoid a possible escape despite the fact that both always attended the hearings.

Fujimori was also there imprisoned for more than 16 months during the investigation of her case, in periods that covered part of 2018, 2019 and 2020.