latimes.com: "Six years after French national Florence Cassez was sent off to serve decades in a Mexican prison for her alleged role in a kidnapping ring, her case is once again stirring heated debate here and abroad.
A member of the Mexican Supreme Court has recommended Cassez be freed because of irregularities in the handling of her prosecution, most notably the fact that federal police staged a replay of her arrest for TV cameras. The court’s five-member “first chamber” must now debate and vote on the recommendation, a process expected to begin Wednesday.
The case has long strained relations between Mexico, where a kidnapping epidemic has left little room for sympathy for an alleged abductor, and France, where Cassez is seen as someone whose rights were trampled.
It is also airing the dirty side of how justice frequently works in Mexico, where politics sometimes trumps proper procedures and where true guilt or innocence is often beside the point. “Cassez merely holds up a mirror to our system,” Ana Laura Magaloni, a law expert, said at a forum held to discuss the case." read more
The MexicoBlog of the Americas Program, a fiscally sponsored program of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), is written by Laura Carlsen. I monitor and analyze international press on Mexico, with a focus on security, immigration, human rights and social movements for peace and justice, from a feminist perspective. And sometimes I simply muse.
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