\n A Peruvian court on Wednesday annulled ex-president Alberto Fujimori's pardon for crimes against humanity and ordered the 80-year-old's immediate arrest, officials said.\n<\/p>\n
\n The South American country's justice department said in a statement that the Supreme Court had \"issued the arrest and detention orders against former president Fujimori so that he may be re-integrated into the prison establishment.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n Fujimori was pardoned by presidential decree last December. He was 12 years into a 25-year jail sentence handed down to him over his ordering of two massacres by death squads between 1991 and 1992.\n<\/p>\n
\n The pardon, issued by then-president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski before he was himself brought down by a corruption scandal, triggered a wave of protests by human rights organizations and by victims of Fujimori's crackdown.\n<\/p>\n
\n Fujimori, a Peruvian of Japanese descent, has been living in Lima but has been hospitalized four times since his release last December.\n<\/p>\n
\n Victims of Fujimori's crackdown had petitioned the Inter-American Court to demand a judicial review of the process that led to the pardon.\n<\/p>\n
\n Carlos Rivera, a lawyer for the victims, said the decision to annul the pardon was justified.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"Kuczynski's pardon to Alberto Fujimori has no legal value and therefore he has to return to prison for irregularities in the process,\" he said.\n<\/p>\n
\n Kuczynski had justified the pardon on humanitarian grounds, given Fujimori's well-documented ill-health.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"International standards in the humanitarian pardon were not met,\" Rivera said.\n<\/p>\n
\n - Health problems -\n<\/p>\n
\n Alejandro Aguinaga, Fujimori's doctor, expressed shock at the news. \"We see that in Peru nothing is respected. The pardon of president Fujimori was a constitutional action,\" Aguinaga told Chilean radio RPP.\n<\/p>\n
\n Fujimori has had a number of operations as part of a long-running battle with tongue cancer. His most recent hospitalization was in August, for an irregular heartbeat.\n<\/p>\n
\n He has been working on a memoir about his decade in power (1990-2000), a period marked by corruption but also by a fight against guerrillas and terrorism.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"I have reached 80 bearing the marks of the years, with all the shocks of political life, the enormous satisfactions and the profound regrets,\" he wrote in a message to AFP around his birthday in July.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"In the few years I have left,\" Fujimori explained in his handwritten text, \"I will dedicate myself to three objectives: bringing my family together, improving my health to the extent possible, and striking a serene and balanced equilibrium in my life.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n - Family feud -\n<\/p>\n
\n However, Fujimori has been unable to reconcile his daughter Keiko, 43, who heads the right-wing Popular Force party, with her 39-year-old brother Kenji, who leads a rival faction of the party, to end a political schism which could see the two face off in the 2021 presidential elections.\n<\/p>\n
\n The charge of crimes against humanity stemmed in part from the killings or disappearances of scores of civilians -- allegedly by a shadowy squad of military officers -- during Peru's bloody struggle against Maoist rebels.\n<\/p>\n
\n The ex-ruler is revered and despised in equal measure in Peru. Admirers laud him for dragging the country's economy into the modern era and defeating the Shining Path guerrilla movement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Peruvian court on Wednesday annulled ex-president Alberto Fujimori's pardon for crimes against humanity and ordered the 80-year-old's immediate arrest, officials said. The South American country's justice department said in a statement that the Supreme Court had \"issued the arrest and detention orders against former president Fujimori so that he may be re-integrated into the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-39093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n