The Prosecutor’s Office has maintained its request for a sentence of seven years in prison for the parents accused of selling their daughter to marry her to the son of the buyers, also prosecuted in the trial, since they believe that the twelve-year-old was “object of negotiation and economic agreement between families”.
The Provincial Court of Madrid left yesterday for sentencing the trial of two pairs of parents of Romanian nationality and gypsy ethnicity, accused of a crime of trafficking in human beings for the purpose of servitude.
The prosecutor, who has raised her provisional conclusions to definitive, understands that the victim was “object of negotiation and objectification”, which “is the essence of the crime of trafficking”, she added.
Likewise, it has alleged that it has the “unequivocal conviction” that this case is part of those in which minors are “the object of economic agreements between families.”
The minor, the prosecutor has concluded, “lived a total situation of uprooting when she was brought to Spain to live an adult life that does not correspond to her.”
The four defenses, one for each of the defendants, have come out against this accusation and have requested the acquittal of their defendants since they consider that “there is not a single piece of evidence to show that there has been payment”, and that in In any case, “they were not aware that they were committing a crime,” since it is something established “in their tradition and culture.”
As an alternative, in the event that the Chamber understands that if they have committed a crime, the defenses propose that the sentence be reduced by two degrees and the minimum be imposed in that case, which would translate into one or two years in prison.
During this last session of the trial, the director of the protection floor of APRAMP (Association for the Prevention, Reintegration and Care of Prostituted Women), where the minor was for ten days until she escaped on October 14, 2021, has declared that the girl, through the center’s mediator, told her that they paid “50,000 euros” for her.
He has also regretted that the minor “was never aware of his situation”, that his rights were violated, but that what he was experiencing “was normal in his culture.”
Precisely last Wednesday, a national police officer in charge of the investigation reported that the minor, of whom they have not received any news, could have escaped with her partner to Romania.
For their part, the minor’s parents claimed that “money was never discussed”, but rather agreed with the young man’s parents to send her to Spain so that they could continue to get to know each other, since the minors liked each other and the young woman wanted to learn Spanish.
According to the provisional findings of the prosecutor, L.A. and S.O.M. agreed to turn their daughter over to C.A. and M.R. in exchange for an amount of money that has not been determined so that she could live as a partner with her son, who was 15 years old.
It relates that on June 22, 2021, “after subjecting the minor to the handkerchief test that proved her virginity, she was forced to maintain a conjugal relationship with the son of the accused.”
The couple who allegedly bought the minor took her to Madrid shortly after, where she remained without schooling, sharing a room with the other young man, and they celebrated their wedding in Seville, always according to the prosecutor’s account.
