María Sevilla, who was the president of the Free Childhood association, entered a social integration center on Monday to serve her sentence, according to sources from the Madrid Superior Court of Justice. She is sentenced to two years and four months in prison for child abduction and the withdrawal of four years of the parental authority of her son, who is currently 14. Seville held the child for more than a year and kept his whereabouts hidden to avoid handing him over. to her father, who had custody since the end of 2017 and whom she accuses of sexual abuse of the child. Justice has not considered these abuses proven and her ex-partner, Rafael Marcos, has denied them at all times. Sevilla, who claims to have acted to protect her son, was arrested in March 2019. She is currently awaiting the Government’s decision on the pardon that she requested last December and which is supported by 181 social groups, including well-known organizations. feminists.
The summons to voluntarily enter prison came a few months after the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal, and a court rejected his request to wait for the Executive to decide on his pardon before entering prison. Social integration centers are penitentiary establishments for inmates who are serving their sentence in an open regime or who are undergoing reintegration processes. Prison sources indicate that Seville is pending classification to determine if it begins to serve the sentence in the second degree (closed regime) or third degree (semi-liberty). Meanwhile, she is in a closed regime in a center in Madrid, according to Consuelo Álvarez, from the Federation of Associations of Women and Minors Resilient to Gender Violence, one of the organizations that is requesting a measure of grace. The Ministry of Justice is processing her request for pardon, which was registered last December.
The beginnings of the case date back to 2012, when the Prosecutor’s Office initiated proceedings after Sevilla, during the family process in which custody was to be decided, said that his mother had told him that the child had reported abuse by the father. Thus began a very long judicial journey that lasts until today. The abuse proceedings have been dismissed. Seville is still pending the Constitutional Court, to which he appealed after the filing of a complaint for abuses that he filed in 2020, “after receiving medical reports”, because he considers that his son’s statement did not have sufficient guarantees.
Arrest in Cuenca
Regarding the family procedure, in November 2016, when the criminal proceedings were dismissed, custody had been awarded to Sevilla, with a visiting regime for the father on alternate weekends that did not become effective. In December 2017, after the mother had taken the child from Madrid to Granada and had not respected the visits, she was granted to Marcos.
The court that in 2020 sentenced her in the first instance for abduction considers it proven that she did not deliver the minor to her father, “keeping her whereabouts hidden, both from him and from the court itself, which she achieved by changing her residence and that of the minor for different reasons. points of Spain”. They ended up on a farm in Villar de Cañas, in the province of Cuenca. In the early hours of March 30, 2019, the police entered the house, arrested her and took the child, who has since lived with his father. Marcos had not seen him since 2016.
From the arrest of Seville there was a media outburst. In a matter of months, the cases of three other mothers related to Infancia Libre — an association for the defense of the rights of minors — emerged, who were arrested or called to testify in the framework of an investigation following complaints from parents, who claimed that they had held their children and that they had falsely accused them of sexual abuse using reports prepared by the same professionals, which endorsed said abuses. The unit of the National Police attached to the courts of Plaza de Castilla came to accuse this entity of “criminal organization”, but the Madrid Provincial Prosecutor’s Office filed the case, failing to appreciate objective data that would ensure that it functioned as an illegal organization.
Sevilla affirms that at all times he has defended the well-being of his son. On February 1, at a press conference with feminist organizations that demanded her pardon, this woman criticized the actions of the justice system. “The truth is that every time we have asked for my son to be protected and that we have asked for help or judicial assistance, he has denied us and we have been punished and crushed for asking for it,” she explained. She said that she was not afraid of going to prison, but that her son “remains in a situation of risk and in an absolute lack of protection.”
Marcos, the boy’s father, emphasizes that “the official reports” support him and that the minor is fine. “He is 14 years old and he can tell what is happening to him. And with all the times we’ve been through social services or the institute, his psychologist… someone would have seen something. Nobody has reported anything ”, he stated a few days ago by phone from the province of Malaga, where they moved during the pandemic, a transfer endorsed by the justice system last year. Seville has appealed that order, in which custody of the child was also denied to be assumed by her maternal grandmother, as she had requested when considering that the minor is still at risk. The boy declared during this process that he wanted to live with his father, as stated in the car. Until now, Seville has seen her son on alternate weekends at a meeting point, first in Madrid and then in Malaga.
Marcos, who has filed a complaint against Seville for false documents, opposes the clemency measure: “All the judicial acts that we have attended agree with me. Asking for a pardon seems totally unfair to me.”
There are 181 organizations that defend it, and in an “urgent” way. Among them, feminist groups such as the Themis Women Jurists Association and the Federation of Progressive Women. At the press conference at the beginning of the month, the spokespersons commented that the case of Seville is not isolated and criticized the fact that the courts continue to apply —despite the fact that the child protection law mandates avoiding it— the syndrome of parental alienation, the belief that one parent manipulates a child against the other, turning the child against them. The entities charge against the lack of credibility given to those who denounce and against the “criminalization of protective mothers.” They support their arguments with the harsh reproach launched at Spain recently by a group of independent experts from the UN, which considers that the judicial system does not sufficiently protect minors from “abusive parents”. Spain’s official response to this procedure is that “it cannot be accepted” that “isolated errors” could lead to a “general conclusion”.
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