Sperisen, who has Swiss and Guatemalan nationality, is the director of the National Civil Police in Guatemala, where he left in 2007 to settle in Switzerland, at the home of his father, who is the ambassador of the World Trade Organization.
“The release of Mr. Sperisen scheduled for Monday will not take place due to the suspension ordered by the Court of Criminal Appeals after the prosecution’s appeal,” lawyer Florian Baier told AFP, confirming a report from television network. local Léman Bleu .
“It is very difficult for the affected person, his wife, his children and his loved ones,” added the lawyer.
A Geneva court on Thursday ordered the “suspension of the execution of the sentence” pending the Federal Court (the highest Swiss judicial instance) ruling on the recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
On June 13, the Strasbourg-based European court condemned Switzerland for the lack of impartiality of a judge who ruled on the Sperisen case.
According to the Court, the judge’s observations made in October 2017 “exceed the declaration of a simple suspicion.”
Sperisen was arrested in Geneva in 2012 and has always maintained his innocence.
The Swiss justice system sentenced him for the first time in 2014 to life in prison, but three years later the Federal Court overturned the sentence after considering the evaluation of some of his evidence “arbitrary” and “incomplete .”
After five years in prison, Sperisen was temporarily released with an electronic bracelet in September 2017, pending a new trial.
In 2018, the Geneva justice system finally sentenced him to 15 years in prison for complicity in the murder of seven inmates in 2006 during an operation to regain control of the Pavón prison. The Federal Court confirmed this conviction in 2019.
