Lawyer Paco Hidalgo explained that the work team will be in charge of undertaking legal and political actions in Ecuador and abroad to seek the release of the former vice president.
The Committee will have an Advisory Council chaired by the former president of Argentina Alberto Fernández and made up of the former presidents of Bolivia Evo Morales, of Colombia Ernesto Samper and of Ecuador Rafael Correa.
In the legal part and in the coordination of the Committee there will be Tamara Lajtman, member of the Lawfare Observatory; the former secretary general of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA-TCP), Sacha Llorenti, as well as jurists and intellectuals.
During the presentation of the Committee, Llorenti explained that the first action will be to send a letter to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to request the intervention of that body and the extension of precautionary measures in favor of Glas.
“Jorge Glas has become a symbol of the fight for respect for human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean,” he reiterated.
For her part, Tamara Lajtman, a member of the Lawfare Observatory, considered that the arrest of the former vice president constituted a premeditated kidnapping directed by President Daniel Noboa, in which his rights were violated.
“Ecuador became a Lawfare laboratory, in which the right, through the judiciary, has persecuted countless political leaders, not only from the Citizen Revolution but also from the left,” she lamented.
The International Committee for the Freedom of Jorge Glas will seek to restore the rights of the former vice president, to guarantee his life, to recover his status as a political asylum, and for the Ecuadorian government to grant him safe passage so that he can travel to Mexico.
This Wednesday, during an habeas corpus hearing held electronically here, Glas announced his delicate state of health since he was kidnapped on April 5, during the assault by Ecuadorian police forces on the Mexican embassy in Quito, where he was taking refuge.
Glas warned that he has kidney and joint problems and reported that he found rodent feces on his bed and that they have bitten him on his legs several times.
He also stated that he is not allowed to have contact with his defenders, both nationally and internationally, who do not receive fees and attend to his case for an humanitarian issue.
The habeas corpus request was presented by lawyer Karen Begonia Gómez with the purpose of getting Glas out of that maximum security penitentiary to attend to his physical and mental health.
The former vice-governor, considered one of the symbols of judicial persecution or “lawfare” in Ecuador, temporarily received the benefit of pre-release on November 28, 2022, after the unification of two prison sentences of six and eight years for the Odebrecht and Bribery cases; however, the measure was revoked.
At the beginning of this year, the justice system ordered his arrest for alleged embezzlement in the case called Reconstruction of Manabí, which investigates alleged embezzlement in public works after the 2016 earthquake.
He was at the Mexican embassy in Quito from December 2023 until April 5 of this year, the day when uniformed officers raided the diplomatic legation to capture him by order of Noboa.
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