(Guatemala) UN experts on Wednesday described as “torture” the conditions of detention of an anti-corruption journalist imprisoned for more than two years in Guatemala.
Experts reported “inhumane conditions of detention” […] which could amount to torture and put his life in danger,” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a statement.
José Rubén Zamora, founder of the newspaper The Periodical and critic of the previous right-wing government of Alejandro Giammattei (2020-2024), has been in prison since July 2022 on money laundering charges.
PHOTO JOSUE DECAVELE, REUTERS ARCHIVES
José Rubén Zamora, founder of the newspaper The Periodical
In June 2023, he was sentenced to six years in prison, but the sentence was overturned on appeal. Last Monday, a court placed him under house arrest pending a retrial.
José Rubén Zamora, however, remains in prison for another case supported by the attorney general, Consuelo Porras, considered “corrupt” by the United States and the European Union.
According to the group of experts, the 68-year-old journalist was “subjected to almost twenty months of isolation in almost constant darkness”, treatment that the experts liken “to torture”.
He is also alleged to have “suffered various forms of inhuman or degrading treatment, including sleep deprivation, forced nudity, arbitrary searches of his cell and failure to respond to a mite infestation in his cell.”
The panel is made up of six experts, including UN special rapporteurs on torture Alice Jill Edwards and on freedom of expression Irene Khan.
At the end of July, the social-democrat president Bernardo Arevalo had described the prosecution brought by the public prosecutor against the journalist as an “abuse of power”.
His imprisonment “is a clear example of the corruption and abuse of power that reigns in the public prosecutor’s office, which persists in incriminating him and supporting a procedure full of inconsistencies,” he denounced.