Venezuela orders releases due to overcrowding in prisons

MADRID, 15 Ago. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) of Venezuela has authorized releases this Sunday to combat overcrowding in prisons.

The president of the TSJ, Judge Gladys María Gutiérrez Alvarado, has reported that an "approach plan has been implemented to decongest pretrial detention centers," according to a report published on the occasion of the first 100 days of her administration in the position.

In addition, he explained that during these three months "many days of legal assistance were held in prisons in the different regions of the country, holding judicial acts."

Gutiérrez has specified that the judicial acts carried out include preliminary hearings, trial openings, review of measures and granting of humanitarian measures, as well as alternative formulas for serving the sentence and redemptions for study and work.

The magistrate, in turn, has indicated that these measures have been taken with the participation of other bodies of the country's judicial system.

In this sense, the Minister of Penitentiary Services, Mirelys Contreras, announced on Saturday that she had visited a preventive detention center --Delegación Anzoátegui-- where she would help to address its overcrowding with the aim of providing "the full guarantee of the Rights Humans".

Contreras met with the Anzoátegui State Police as part of the aforementioned program. "There are more than 150 subjects who are in the preventive retention centers of the regional Police who are being evaluated by the minister in order to speed up the judicial processes," the police force explained on its Twitter account.