The imprisoned former Peruvian president Pedro Castillo asked the Constitutional Court this Monday to release him immediately and suspend the preventive detention he has been serving for a year when he was dismissed for trying to dissolve Congress.
Castillo formulated his request in the framework of a virtual hearing before the court, which evaluates five habeas corpus appeals to annul a court ruling that sent the former leftist president to prison until December 2025.
“Dear magistrates, I request that this entire procedure and its subsequent acts be annulled and declared null and void,” Castillo said from the Barbadillo prison, in the east of Lima.
The Court’s decision will be known this week, which will mark one year since its fall, when Congress dismissed him for the flagrant crime of rebellion against the democratic regime for ordering the closure of Parliament.
On December 7, 2022, Castillo read a message to the country broadcast on radio and television where he announced that he was dissolving Congress, that he was going to govern by decrees and the convocation of a Constituent Assembly. He was then detained by the police when he was going with his family to the Mexican embassy in Lima.
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“I never took up arms,” Castillo alleged before the magistrates, indicating that His request to dissolve Congress was not carried out because his orders were not followed by the armed forces.
The former president (2021-2022) reiterated his version that he was removed from office within the framework of an alleged political conspiracy between the right-wing Congress and the prosecutor’s office, which was investigating him for alleged corruption.
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“Of course there has been a whole scaffolding, a prepared action, to overthrow my Government,” he said this Monday.
Castillo, a rural teacher, is serving 36 months of preventive detention, waiting for the justice system to decide his eventual call to trial.
His fall brought Dina Boluarte, who was his vice president, to power.
AFP
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