The Court of Madrid has acquitted the parents accused of selling their 12-year-old daughter to marry her to the youngest son of another marriage, who has also been exonerated, in a sentence in which the magistrates stress that they have not had “the main source of evidence”: the statement of the minor, who ran away.
In the sentence of Section 16 of the Madrid hearing, to which Efe has had access and which is appealable before the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid (TSJM), the magistrates explain that the evidence carried out “is notoriously insufficient to prove the facts “for which the Prosecutor’s Office requested 7 years in prison for the defendants, of Romanian origin and gypsy ethnicity.
The Public Ministry charged them with a crime of trafficking in human beings for the purpose of servitude.
The magistrates emphasize that the statement of the young woman before the Provincial Immigration Brigade of the National Police was recorded “without any guarantee” and that “has prevented it from being reproduced during the plenary session with the value of documentary evidence”, so that ” This Court has been deprived of the main source of evidence on which to presuppose a hypothetical conviction”.
“To the demonstrations attributed to the minor at police headquarters, once the recording was completed, and in which she would have acknowledged that her father had ‘sold’ her, as it was translated by the interpreter who was assisting her at that time and whose statement it was not proposed (…) they cannot be granted, for the same reasons, any probative value”, add the judges, who affirm that a mediator from the reception center was not called to testify in the trial, to whom the girl allegedly He said the same idea.
In addition, the young woman, after declaring before the police and being transferred to a shelter, escaped and did not testify again in the process, while her parents and the parents of the young man she married have maintained that there was no sale.
Thus, the Chamber does not consider it accredited that the minor was forced to marry or sold to another family, or that she was retained in the family home.
The court does consider it accredited that the two minors, after contacting through social networks and acting with the consent of their respective parents, agreed to marry in Romania according to the gypsy rite, within their tradition.
Previously, the minor had to submit, on June 22, 2021, to the handkerchief test to record her virginity.
Two days later, her parents went to a Romanian notary to state that their daughter would reside with the young man’s mother and that from that moment, and until the year 2024, they authorized the minor to travel abroad accompanied by her, granting the young man’s mother the power to make decisions on his behalf.
Thus, on June 24, 2021, a party was held to celebrate the relationship that began between the two minors.
Two days later, on June 26, 2021, the young man’s parents moved with the girl from Bucharest to Madrid, residing from then on in Mejorada del Campo (Madrid), and on September 17, a meeting was held in Guillena (Seville). party to celebrate the link between minors again.
On October 4, 2021, the Police entered the home where the young people lived with their parents and arrested the two adults, while the minor was transferred to the protection floor for victims of trafficking, where she remained until the day October 14, when he escaped.
