The Judiciary issued the first conviction in the Awajún language in the Superior Court of Justice of Amazonas, within the framework of the National Specialized Justice System for the Protection and Punishment of Violence against Women and Members of the Family Group (SNEJ).
The ruling was handed down by the Subspecialized Collegiate Criminal Court of Santa María de Nieva, in the province of Condorcanqui, with the support of translators during the oral trial and the reading of the sentence, because both the accused and the victim communicate in said native language.
The resolution, notified in Spanish and Awajún, concluded with a sentence of 32 years of imprisonment against the accused for the crime of sexual rape of a minor under 14 years of age.
The panel was made up of judges José Espichán Gadea, who chaired the debates, along with Róger Mendoza Herrera and Segundo Rojas Ramos, marking a milestone in intercultural access to justice in the Amazon region.
The president of the Judiciary, Janet Tello, highlighted that the implementation of the SNEJ in Condorcanqui responds to previous coordination work with communal authorities to delimit the powers between ordinary justice and communal justice in cases of sexual violence.
He stressed that these crimes must be dealt with by the formal judicial system and urged the eradication of practices that seek to resolve sexual assaults through material compensation, reaffirming the need for an effective criminal sanction and the protection of victims.
