On 31 August 2020, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child praised Argentina’s decision to not deport a Peruvian mother after she completed her sentence for drug trafficking, taking into account the best interests of her three children, marking a new precedent in the country. In 2000, she was sentenced to imprisonment and was to be deported following her release and prohibited from re-entering the country. Three years later, she was released and Argentina’s immigration authority (Dirección Nacional de Migraciones or DNM) requested her deportation. Her case reached the Supreme Court in 2019, during which the Court approached the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, who warned the country’s immigration authority of the irreparable damage that separation would entail for her three children. The DNM subsequently decided to suspend the deportation order against the mother and provide her with a permanent residency permit in July 2020. The president of the Working Group on Individual Communications, Ann Skelton, member of the Committee on the Rights of the Child, said that if the mother “had been deported, her children would have been separated from their mother or obligated to leave Argentina, the only country they know.”
On 31 July, Iberoamérica Central de Noticias (ICN) reported that from the start of the pandemic, more than 2,200 prisoners had been released from Argentina’s prisons, representing a reduction of 16 percent of the prison population. In addition, to avoid overcrowding, the government began on 7 August construction works in three prisons of the Province of Buenos Aires with the objective of building 1,350 new spaces until the end of the year. The plan comes after calls from part of prisoners and organisations to reduce overcrowding as well as after riots took place in certain prisons around the country during the Covid-19 crisis.
- ICN Diario, “Por la Pandemia Más de 2.200 Presos Salieron de las Cárceles Federales de Argentina,” 31 July 2020, https://www.icndiario.com/2020/07/pandemia-mas-de-2-200-presos-salieron-de-las-carceles-federales-de-argentina/
- Europa Press, “El Comité de Derechos del Niño de la ONU Aplaude la Decisión de Argentina de no Deportar a una Madre,” 31 August 2020, https://www.europapress.es/internacional/noticia-comite-derechos-nino-onu-aplaude-decision-argentina-no-deportar-madre-20200831143506.html
- Radio Ñandutí, “Argentina Inicia Obras en Varias Carceles Para Evitar Hacinamiento,” 7 August 2020, http://www.nanduti.com.py/2020/08/07/argentina-inicia-obras-varias-carceles-evitar-hacinamiento/
