The Supreme Court of Justice sent a warning to the courts again for the delay in a case for child sexual abuse and recommended evaluate disciplinary sanctions to the magistrates who intervened. This is the second decision of this type that is known in a week on files paralyzed for years due to jurisdiction disputes.
The highest court intervened after verifying that a complaint filed in 2014 in the province of Tucuman For a rape case against a teenager, it was never clarified which court was competent and she was detained for more than a decade without progress, according to the ruling to which she agreed. Infobae.
According to the resolution, the file began in July 2014 at a police station in Los Nogales, where a woman He denounced his ex-partner for the sexual abuse of his youngest daughter during a visit in 2012 to a home in Florida.province of Buenos Aires. At the time, the victim was 16 years old.
The case reached the Court of Instruction of the III Nomination of San Miguel de Tucumán, in charge of the judge Juan Francisco Pisawho declared himself incompetent in October 2014 because understood that The incident had occurred in Buenos Aires jurisdiction.
The proceedings were only sent to the Buenos Aires Justice Department more than a year later, in March 2016. But the head of the Guarantee Court No. 1 of San Isidro also rejected the jurisdiction: in this case, under the argument that Measures were lacking to precisely confirm the place where the incident occurred and a statement had not been taken from the victim.
Thus, the file returned to the Tucumán court, where Judge Pisa once again declared himself incompetent in December 2017 and ordered the incident to be elevated to the Supreme Court. Days later, the investigating prosecutor Washington Navarro ordered that the proceedings be reserved until the conflict of jurisdiction was resolved. The course of the file took another step on October 8, 2018, when the prosecutor decided to send it to the Special Case Resolution Unit in 60 pages.
But the procedure was reserved and Only in September 2024, during controls on pending cases, the courts warned that the jurisdiction incident had never been properly formed..
The judge Raul Cardozoa member of the College of Judges of the Capital Judicial Center of Tucumán, sent the case to the prosecutor’s office to continue while the National Court decided who should intervene.
In their ruling, the judges Horacio Rosatti, Carlos Rosenkrantz and Ricardo Lorenzetti They considered that it was appropriate to send the file to the Tucumán courts so that they could gather the necessary elements and resolve the complaint, taking into account article 118 of the National Constitution, which regulates territorial jurisdiction.
Furthermore, they indicated that the courts involved They must deal with the case without delay and guarantee that the damage to the victim, now of legal age, is not increased by going through the judicial system.
Finally, the judges ordered to notify the Supreme Court of Justice of Tucumán to evaluate measures and the eventual application of disciplinary sanctions to the magistrates who intervened.
Last week, in another child sexual abuse case filed in Santa Fe in 2009the Supreme Court of Justice issued a ruling with a similar reproach to magistrates for the delay in processing a complaint filed by the mother of a 12-year-old girl, who pointed out that a relative was responsible for the events that occurred in Pilarprovince of Buenos Aires.
The Santa Fe courts kept the file stagnant for years, even after the victim underwent medical examinations. In total, 15 years passed without the investigation progressing.
Finally, the highest court ordered the case to be processed immediately and recommended that the application of disciplinary sanctions be evaluated for the prolonged judicial inaction.
The resolution stressed that the questioned behaviors are repudiated by the Argentine legal system and that judges must prevent people who suffer violence from being subjected to new situations of re-victimization within the judicial system.
