Pro-choice activists say Evelyn Beatríz Hernández’s case will be important in determining the stance of the country’s new leader

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A teenage rape victim in El Salvador who was convicted for murdering her child and jailed for nearly three years after a stillbirth will face a retrial next week, her lawyers said on Wednesday.

Evelyn Beatríz Hernández was handed a 30-year prison sentence in 2017 for aggravated murder by a female judge who ruled the teenager had induced an abortion, which is a crime under any circumstance in the Central American nation.

Her sentence was annulled in February in an appeal before El Salvador’s top court, marking a victory for the Citizen Group for the Decriminalisation of Abortion (CDFA), a local rights group pushing to free about 20 jailed women with similar cases.

“We’re convinced that Evelyn is innocent,” Ana Martínez, one of Hernández’s lawyers at the CDFA, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation ahead of Monday’s court date. “We hope that on Monday the rule of law and justice wins in this country.”

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Abortion has been a crime since 1997 in the socially conservative and Catholic majority nation, even in cases of rape and incest, when the woman’s life is in danger or if the foetus is deformed.

Pro-choice activists say Hernández’s retrial is an important test case that could signal the stance on abortion taken by El Salvador’s new president, Nayib Bukele, who took office in June.

Bukele has said he believes abortion should be allowed only if the mother’s life is at risk.

“This case would be the first case that would be tried after the new president is in power,” said Paula Ávila-Guillén, director for Latin America initiatives at the Women’s Equality Center, a US-based reproductive rights advocacy group.

“It will also send a message about what is the political mood.”

Hernández, now 21 and from a poor rural community, said she was raped and did not realise she was pregnant until she went into labour in a bathroom and gave birth to a stillborn baby.

The CDFA said there was no proof that she tried to kill her baby and that she suffered a pregnancy-related complication.

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While six other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have absolute bans on abortion, El Salvador stands out for its high number of convictions.

About 20 women are in jail for abortion crimes when they suffered miscarriages, stillbirths or pregnancy complications, some serving sentences of up to 40 years, the CDFA said.

The United Nations called on El Salvador in 2017 to issue a moratorium on applying its abortion law and to review all cases where women have been imprisoned for abortion related crimes.

But attempts to pass a bill that would ease El Salvador’s abortion ban have failed.

“One of the factors is a very religious and strong evangelical society,” said Ávila-Guillén.

“There’s no presumption of innocence. The moment that the word abortion gets thrown in a case, from that moment on women are guilty in the eyes of everyone.”