Seventeen years after the events, and following intervention by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, justice has finally been served to Azul Rojas, a transgender woman who was beaten and raped with a baton by three police officers in a police station in northern Peru.
Immediate imprisonment for the accused. A court in Lima, the capital of Peru, on Monday, December 15, sentenced to 17 years in prison each the three police officers who tortured and raped a transgender woman in a police station in 2008, a case for which Peru had been condemned at the international level.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights had in fact condemned Peru in 2020 for the brutal assault suffered by Azul Rojas, then 34, struck and raped with a baton by three police officers while she was in detention in a police station in Casa Grande, on the north coast of this South American country. The police, according to the Court’s ruling, targeted her because of “her membership in the LGBTI community”.
Transgender Identity in Peru
Two years later, the Peruvian government had offered apologies to the victim. At the Inter-American Court’s request, Peru also pursued investigations against the accused, who appeared free. The police officers were ultimately found guilty of having subjected the victim to “physical and psychological abuse and a rape”.
In 2024, Peru abandoned the classification of transgender identity among mental disorders, a classification abandoned in 2022 by the World Health Organization.
