UN Panel Finds Arrest and Detention of Organizer Nestora Salgado Illegal The Associated Press
go to original February 3, 2016

Nestora Salgado, a community police leader, returned to her native Mexico from Seattle in 2013 to help protect residents from cartel operatives. (Free Nestora Campaign/freenestora.org)

Update: UN Group's Resolution to Release Nestora Binding on Government (La Jornada)

A United Nations panel has ruled that Mexico’s 2013 arrest and continuing detention of a community police leader was illegal, raising hopes among her supporters she could be freed.

Nestora Salgado is a Seattle-area resident who returned to her native Mexico and led a vigilante-style – but legal – community police force, which mounted patrols to protect residents from cartel operatives.

Salgado was arrested in August 2013 after people detained by her group alleged they had been kidnapped.

The International Human Rights Clinic at Seattle University Law School took her case to the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. In a decision released this week, the five-member panel called her arrest arbitrary. The ruling is not binding on Mexico, but it could increase pressure to release her.

Read the rest at The Guardian

Related: Nestora Salgado's Arrest "Illegal and Arbitrary": UN Group on Arbitrary Detention (Proceso)

Related: Mexican Woman Jailed for Combating Cartels: 'It Is a Sacrifice That Had to be Made' (The Guardian)

Activists Protest Incarceration of Community Leader Nestora Salgado (teleSUR English)

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