The news that the prosecutor general of Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy) has accused Francesco Arcuri of physical and psychological violence and humiliation towards his children has put the case of Juana Rivas back on the agenda in the media, social networks and gatherings. Many remember the judge’s ruling Manuel Piñar that in 2018 the sentenced to five years in prison for theft of his children as the turning point in this case. A sentence that the Supreme Court later reduced by half and that Rivas partially complied with due to the Government’s pardon.
But the ordeal of Rivas and his children in court did not begin or end with this sentence. The Rivas case cannot be seen only by the sentence of a sexist and misogynist judge (its various sentences prove it), but for the egregious failures of a justice system that questions mothers and fails to protect their sons and daughters when they report gender violence that they and their children suffer, and it is called institutional violence.
The Rivas case began long before Judge Piñar, when the court of first instance number 3 of Granada accepted and executed the order to return the minors, then aged 3 and 11, to their father in Italy. Justice applied, without any safeguard, the Hague Convention. An international treaty that obliges the signatory states (Spain and Italy) to imminently return minors to their last country of residence in cases of abduction. One of the exceptions of the treaty was not taken into account, which stipulates that States will not be obliged to return minors if “there is a serious risk“that this action “exposes them to physical danger or in any other way puts the minor in an intolerable situation.”
But if there was a turning point in the case of Juana Rivas, it was the fact that a judge from the violence against women court number 2 of Granada decided not to process the complaint filed by Rivas against Francesco Arcuri in August 2016when she was in Spain with the minors and they had been recognized as a victim of gender violence. Arcuri had been convicted in 2009 for gender violence, but Rivas’s new complaint against him was kept in a drawer for more than a year without processing or looking at the substance of its contents. In it, Rivas stated that he feared for his integrity and that of his children. According to his lawyers, not having taken into account this complaint and the reasons that led Rivas to disappear in August 2017 with his children so as not to hand them over to his father. marked the entire subsequent development of judicial torture.
This is not an isolated case. In December 2021, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women warned that justice in Spain has a structural pattern that unprotects children and discriminates against women. A year later this same expert asked our country for explanations due to the widespread use of the so-called Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), a series of sexist stereotypes that blame mothers when they report gender violence or sexual violence towards their sons and daughters.
Parallel trials in two countries that do not cooperate
But if the case in our country’s justice system had biases and serious failures, in Italy things did not improve. The civil trial opened in that country to decide on the custody of the minors never incorporated the complaint of gender violence presented by Rivas in 2016 or the multiple complaints that she filed for her ex-partner’s mistreatment of her children in Italy, when the minors were already in their custody. The expert witness appointed by the court, Ludovica Iesu, emphatically applied a SAP for which she blamed the mother and advised giving custody of the minors to the father.
Finally the decision was annulled and the case was reopened in the Cagliari appeals court. This court decreed in June 2022 that the eldest of Rivas’s children went with the mother to Spain, but that the youngest remained in the custody of the father despite the fact that in court he had recounted the daily violence he suffered from his father. However, a phone call in which the minor retracted what he said and blamed his mother for instructing him was enough for the court to decide to believe the latter version and separate the brothers. Sources from Rivas’s defense affirm that said call occurred from the family home and in the presence of the father. At no point in this entire complex process have the minors been protected or separated from the father..
Last April, the Supreme Court of Cassation (the Italian Supreme Court) fully accepted the appeal presented by Rivas against the judicial decision that separated the brothers and gave custody of the minor to Arcuri. The high court forced the custody trial to be repeated, something that has not happened to date.
Nobody protects minors
But perhaps the most bloody fact of all this judicial rigmarole is the lack of protection of minors. Rivas’s eldest son recounted before the court and in various expert reports the terrible violence he received from his father, without this having opened any action either in Italy or in Spain to protect them. Even more serious: the Cagliari prosecutor’s office notified Arcuri of the accusation of mistreatment on November 15, without protective measures being taken towards the child, who is currently ten years old and who continues to live with his father.
The delays and delays of justice throughout the more than seven years that this process has taken are patent and incomprehensible. The Italian prosecutor’s office has denounced this delay as “inadmissible.” But the reality is that no Italian or Spanish institution has lifted a finger to protect children. The culmination of the nonsense is reflected in the fact that the civil court of Cagliari decided to give custody of the youngest of the children to the father while the Prosecutor’s Office investigated him for mistreatment. But it should be noted that this institution took nearly three years to investigate the various complaints presented by Rivas against Arcuri, as well as several expert and hospital reports that confirmed the violence.
Rivas’s youngest son has Spanish nationality, but so far, no body has taken sides or denounced the violence that a Spanish national and minor may be suffering in a foreign country. What else is needed to act?
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