The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice on Tuesday confirmed the 30-year prison sentence against former police officer Eusebio Torres Romero for torture committed during the Stroessner dictatorship. With this ruling, the country’s highest court definitively closes the appeals process, upholding the sentence imposed on one of the regime’s symbols of repression.
The Court adopted the resolution by rejecting the extraordinary cassation appeal filed by Torres Romero’s defense. The convicted man’s lawyers sought to annul the sentence, arguing that the events investigated, which occurred in 1976, were time-barred. The defense claimed an alleged contradiction between Article 5 of the National Constitution, which establishes the imprescriptibility of torture crimes, and Article 14 of the same Magna Carta, which prohibits retroactive laws.
However, Ministers María Carolina Llanes, Manuel Dejesús Ramírez Candia, and Alberto Martínez Simón unanimously ruled that there is no normative contradiction in Paraguayan law. The court reasoned that crimes against humanity, including torture, are imprescriptible by their very nature and by the imperative norms of ius cogens governing international law—higher principles that prevail regardless of when the acts were committed.
During the ruling’s argument, Minister Manuel Ramírez Candia emphasized that imprescriptibility is an unavoidable international commitment assumed by the Paraguayan State. The magistrate cited the established jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which holds that prescription mechanisms or any domestic law provisions attempting to block the investigation and subsequent sanction of serious human rights violations are absolutely inadmissible.
Minister María Carolina Llanes added complementary historical and legal reasoning in the resolution, pointing out that the defense omitted essential teleological aspects of justice in structuring its claims. According to Llanes, any attempt at impunity in this type of case directly conflicts with the fundamental human right of victims to access justice and with Paraguay’s historic commitment not to leave crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship unpunished.