III. POSITIONS OF THE PARTIES A. Petitioner 24. The petitioner narrates a series of events related to his criminal prosecution and conviction and to the PNP’s decision to retire him from service because of a staff renewal program. In the petitioner’s view, those incidents constituted violations of the rights enshrined in Articles 5.1, 5.2, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.5, 7.6, 8.1, 8.2, 9, 10, 11.1, 24, and 25 of the American Convention. 25. The petitioner states that in 1994, when he held the rank of Commander in the National Police of Peru, he was appointed Assistant Director for Passports. He states that in August and September 1994, the media covered a news story about Peruvian passports bearing forgeries of his signature and seal being seized from criminals. 26. According to the petitioner, when he discovered that those documents had been issued and received by the Head of the Immigration Office, and upon learning about the “crude forgery” of his signature, he publicly denounced the situation, in writing, to the Minister of the Interior and requested the immediate opening of an investigation. 27. He states that the corresponding investigation was begun, the result of which was Police Report No. 079 of October 21, 1994, which identified the possible perpetrators, including police officers and civilians, and that his name did not appear on the list. With that document, he adds, judicial proceedings began. According to be petitioner’s version of events, one of the accused, “in collusion with the prosecutor” and acting beyond the confines of the police investigation, presented alleged “statements given in the investigation” that were not included in the Police Report and that were “maliciously” concealed by the prosecutor for 24 hours, until the formal criminal charges were filed on October 21, 1994, with the sole purpose of denying the alleged victim his right of defense. 28. Those statements, he reports, accused him of actions he did not commit and were made in reprisal for his denouncing the sale of passports to criminal gangs. He states that this succeeded in removing the other accused from the focus of the press scandal, since from that time forward, the media portrayed him as the boss of the mafia. 29. The petitioner states that based on those accusations, the prosecutor included him in the criminal complaint and sought his arrest, without previously summoning him to offer a defense against the charges leveled at him. The judge began the committal proceedings and ordered his arrest; thus, he was detained for a period of eight months until the Fifth Criminal Chamber, in a ruling of June 22, 1995, granted him release on bail on the grounds that the evidence indicated that the charges on which the arrest warrant was based no longer existed. 1 The petitioner claims that his arrest and detention was unnecessary, abusive, unfair, and motivated by an assumption of guilt instead of innocence. 30. The petitioner states that – paradoxically, given his release on bail – on November 8, 1996, the Fifth Criminal Chamber sentenced him to a four-year suspended prison term for crimes against public documents and against the administration of justice and for the corruption of public officials. He claims that the sole basis for this conviction was the accusation made by one of his fellow defendants, which was supported by no additional proof and failed to take into account the numerous statements and other evidence indicating his innocence. The petitioner notes that the judgment inverted the burden of proof and that one of the grounds 1 Textually, the grounds for the bail order were: “the existence of contradictions regarding the charges that he made against the appellant in his statement given to the investigation () the accused Cárdenas Hurtado states that it was Commander Zegarra Marín who personally handed the 525 passports over to him, but that claim has been disproved with the discovery that he received the batch of passports in question from Víctor Salcedo Silva, a civilian employee at the Subdirectorate of Immigration Control under the authority of Commander Julio Lozada Castro (...) The Expert Handwriting Report prepared by the Criminalistics Laboratory of the National Police of Peru () indicates that passport number zero forty-one fifty-nine eighteen, issued in the name of Daniel Enrique Vega Acha, bears the forged signature of the accused Zegarra Marín () and consequently, the charges that gave rise to the arrest warrant no longer exist.” 3