An Ecuador court declared this Friday (12) “illegal” and “arbitrary” the detention of former vice president Jorge Glas at the Mexican Embassy in Quito, but kept him in prison because he has not yet served an eight-year sentence. years in prison for two convictions handed down in previous years.
The Specialized Room for Family, Childhood, Adolescence and Adolescent Offenders of the National Court of Justice of Ecuador, composed of magistrates Monica Heredia, Liz Barrera and Adrian Rojas, considered that Glas’s rights were violated due to the fact that the Ecuadorian State had not complied with the procedure established in national standards for operations in diplomatic missions.
However, the court denied the request for habeas corpus with which Glas sought to annul his detention and be handed over to Mexico or another country that would grant him asylum, as the Mexican government had done hours before his detention, considering him politically persecuted. .
“It would be appropriate to order the immediate release of the person in question, but there are final and unappealable convictions”, decided the court, as the former vice president in the government of Rafael Correa (2007-2017) had been released in 2022 without completing the pending sentences, thanks to a controversial court decision on precautionary measures.
Glas was sentenced in 2017 to six years in prison for illicit association in the Odebrecht case, and in 2020 to eight years in prison for receiving bribes in the case about the irregular financing of Correa’s political movement, in which the former president was also convicted. .
Recently, he had managed to combine the two sentences to serve only eight years and sought the penitentiary benefit of “pre-release” to avoid having to return to prison after having served most of the sentence, having been imprisoned for almost five years. years between 2017 and 2022, but this was denied.
However, Glas was captured because he had a preventive arrest order in the case of reconstruction works in a province affected by the strong earthquake of 2016. He is accused of embezzlement of public funds, a crime that in the Ecuadorian penal code is punishable by ten to 13 years in prison.
The court validated the arrest warrant because it was issued within the parameters of Ecuadorian law, with sufficient evidence of the crime and an existing risk of flight, since at the time Glas was already staying at the Mexican Embassy.
The former vice president has been at the Mexican diplomatic headquarters since December 17, 2023 to request asylum, declaring himself a victim of political persecution and “lawfare” (use of the judicial apparatus against political opponents), as he claims to be innocent of all charges .
The government of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador granted Glas asylum on April 5, amid a diplomatic crisis with Ecuador, and hours later Ecuadorian police and military forces stormed the embassy to arrest Glas.
In La Roca, the maximum security prison in Ecuador where he is now, Glas participated in the hearing via videoconference and claimed that, during his detention, he was a victim of torture, having been beaten with kicks, knees and other blows.
The former vice president said the men who arrested him had their faces covered and never identified themselves or told him why he was being detained until he was taken to the Arrest Unit, where he was then read his rights.
The court that heard the request for habeas corpus presented by the politician’s defense saw no responsibility on the part of the country’s president, Daniel Noboa, or the Minister of Government and Interior, Monica Palencia, and declared itself incompetent to decide whether the asylum granted to him for Mexico was appropriate.
For the Ecuadorian government, the asylum granted to Glas was illegal and violated the Convention on Diplomatic Asylum, which establishes that people prosecuted in common justice for common crimes cannot receive this benefit.