Ecuador to expel 3,000 foreigners imprisoned in its prisons

President Guillermo Lasso has confirmed that he will deport or extradite foreigners deprived of their liberty. According to statistics collected by the National Comprehensive Attention Service of Ecuador, 9% of those arrested are foreigners. Of these, the majority are Colombians. Until last July, in the country There were 1,935 Colombian prisoners, 1,225 from Venezuela, 135 from Peru, 59 from Mexico and the rest of other countries.

The director of the National Comprehensive Care Service, Fausto Cobo, said the repatriation of prisoners to their countries would be one of the measures to deal with the prison crisis. The initiative consists of returning 3,532 people deprived of their liberty to their country of origin. Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico are the main countries of these prisoners and the intention is to reduce overcrowding, which this year is around 30%.

The data also shows that the prison population of foreigners in Ecuador has increased in percentage over the past two years. In April 2019, there were 2,802 foreigners in the country’s 36 prisons, which at the time represented 7% of detainees.

To make the transfer possible, at least the following conditions must be met: qThat the accused despite a pending criminal conviction, that Ecuador and the convicted person’s country of origin have approved the transfer and that there is an agreement between the two countries which allows extradition.

In November 2005, the former Ministry of Justice signed the Strasbourg Convention on the transfer of sentenced persons of 1983, which aims to cooperate in the repatriation of sentenced persons. 62 nations have signed the document, which establishes more conditions than stated. Some of them are that the detainee agrees to return to his country and that the remaining sentence to be served is at least six months.

Ecuador maintains a repatriation agreement with Colombia, signed in 1990. There it was established as a requirement that the person deprived of liberty should not have any reparations ordered by justice in the sentence of his conviction and that the crime for which he was punished is established as established in the criminal law of his country.

The main difficulty in allowing the deportation of prisoners to Colombia is that this country also suffers from prison overcrowding. In March 2021, the overcrowding index reached 20.65%, as recorded by the National Penitentiary and Penitentiary Institute of Colombia. The prisons there have a capacity of 80,000 people and the system currently numbers over 97,000 people deprived of their liberty, showing the flaws in the overall criminal justice system.

The expulsion and repatriation of prisoners is a long and complex process. There are currently 143 ongoing repatriation processes in Ecuador. According to official information, in 2020, only one repatriation was carried out in March of the same year, which returned a German citizen serving a 10-year sentence for drug trafficking.

At present, Ecuador is going through a deep prison crisis due to the standardized management of rehabilitation centers. It was not until February of this year that serious riots and the massacre of 79 prisoners were reported. That figure rose to 116 in August after the national government took control of violence in prisons that were the epicenter of the seditious acts.

President Guillermo Lasso’s statements yesterday complement a comprehensive plan to neutralize the overwhelming violence in Ecuadorian prisons that has escalated since February 2021, before Lasso took office. For this, it is planned to allow the release by court order of detainees who have served most of their sentence and whose crimes are not dangerous for society. It also aims to free inmates who suffer from clinically diagnosed catastrophic illnesses.

Fausto Cobo, a passive Colonel of the Armed Forces with extensive experience in security matters, recently appointed by President Lasso to stop the riots, assured that “we are experiencing a structural crisis in the Ecuadorian penitentiary system, but it is an effect of a larger crisis that has been accumulating for years ”.

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