Displaying items by tag: convictions

Three retired colonels have been sentenced to fifteen years in prison for orchestrating the 1982 killings of four Dutch journalists during El Salvador’s civil war. They are former defence minister Jose Guillermo Garcia (91), Francisco Moran (93), and Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena (85). The journalists had been filming with leftist rebels when ambushed by soldiers in a planned military trap. A 1993 UN truth commission had previously identified the ambush as orchestrated by Reyes, who remains in the USA despite an extradition request. Garcia and Moran are currently under police watch in a private hospital. The case was revived in 2018 after El Salvador's supreme court struck down a postwar amnesty. Advocacy from the victims’ families and international bodies, including the Dutch government and EU, pressured authorities to bring long-delayed justice.

A panel of fourteen neonatal experts has questioned the convictions of Lucy Letby, claiming they did not find murders in their medical examination of evidence. Letby, a former neonatal nurse, was convicted in 2023 of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others at the Countess of Chester Hospital. Her legal team continues to challenge the verdicts, with her case now under review by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). At a press conference, retired medic Dr Shoo Lee argued that medical failings, not murder, were responsible for the babies' deaths. He cited poor hospital procedures, staff shortages, and delays in care as contributing factors. His evidence was previously rejected in Letby’s failed appeals. The CCRC is now assessing her case, though it does not determine guilt or innocence. Meanwhile, Letby is serving fifteen whole life orders in prison, with previous appeals unanimously dismissed by judges.

Thousands of children aged between three and seventeen live in slavery on Lake Volta, working up to 18 hours a day in the fishing industry. They are paid in daily abuse and threats, and the only way out is to drown or be rescued. Praise God for two convictions when the accused men pleaded guilty to human trafficking. One of them, who used the children for labour on his fishing boat, must also pay a fine or spend an additional year to the five-year sentence if unable to pay. While IJM has previously seen convictions for child labour in Ghana, these are their first for human trafficking, and a significant step toward ending slavery in the fishing industry.

In January bold judgments in Philippine courts have been protecting children, and global collaboration is tackling a form of modern slavery that was unimaginable before the digital age. Trafficking convictions, secured in courts across the Philippines, held four Filipina women accountable for abusing and exploiting children, and sharing that abuse with predators around the world who were willing to pay. The Philippine government receives thousands of cybersex trafficking case referrals like these every month - cases in which paying customers around the world can easily connect online with an adult in the Philippines who has access to vulnerable children. With just an internet connection and a webcam or mobile device, these traffickers abuse boys and girls, or force them to perform sex acts, for the foreign customers who are paying to watch. The cases reaching court judgments last month represented over a dozen young survivors - the youngest only three years old.