Swiss court annuls Sperisen’s 15-year sentence
The Federal Court has overturned Erwin Sperisen's 15-year prison sentence for aiding and abetting murder. This followed a decision by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
The Geneva cantonal court handed down the original verdict against the former police chief of Guatemala in 2018. In a ruling scheduled for publication on Monday, the Supreme Court partially allows Sperisen’s appeal.
This is based on the ECHR ruling of June 13th. The Human Rights Court in Strasbourg came to the conclusion that the President of the Appeal Chamber of the Geneva Court of Appeal was biased.
The Federal Court referred the case back to the Geneva courts so that they could resume the proceedings as they were at the beginning of October 2017. It did not decide whether to release Sperisen. This was suspended at the request of the Geneva public prosecutor’s office.
The decision rests with the cantonal criminal and enforcement court.
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.