Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Honduran human rights organizations have yet to locate alleged war criminal

Note: This article was translated from the Honduran national daily newspaper El Tiempo print edition for Wednesday, August 10th. We were not able to find the article on the digital edition of El Tiempo at http://www.tiempo.hn. The original title of the article in Spanish is Organismos humanitarios todavía no ubican a supuesto criminal de guerra.

Honduran human rights organizations have yet to locate alleged war criminal

Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Tegucigalpa

Francisco Rodríguez

Human rights organizations plan to ask the Government of Canada for detailed information regarding ex-Batallion 3-16 member Cristóbal González Ramírez, an alleged war criminal.

The Canadian Border Services Agency deported González Ramírez, age 44, on August 2nd, but his whereabouts are not known by humanitarian organizations in Honduras.

The coordinator of the Committee of Families of the Detained and Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), Bertha Oliva, says that González Ramírez's deportation was announced August 2nd in Canada.

"We are going to approach the Canadian government for detailed information regarding why they have him on a list of 30 war criminals," says Oliva.

She indicated that all they know is that the individual was deported, but that they have not been informed of the specific charges against him nor his whereabouts. "He must be here (in Honduras), but we don't know where exactly," she added.

According to reports in the hands of the Canadian Government, approximately eight Honduran ex-military linked to extrajudicial executions in the 1980s are residing as undocumented in Canada.

[The information below was included as a separate insert to the print edition of the article. A reproduction of other names on Canada's list of alleged war criminals was also included in the El Tiempo article.]

Rejected:
In August of 2008, González Ramírez moved from Vancouver to Edmonton, and in January of 2009 he was told that his application for refugee status had been rejected due to suspician that he had participated in crimes against humanity in Honduras.