The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has announced that three Argentine political prisoners whose freedom it sought for years have been paroled and are out of jail.
Rabbi Morton Rosenthal, ADL’s Latin American Affairs director, said that he was informed by the Argentine Embassy in Washington of the release of Mario Jaime Zareceansky, Claudia Ines Kon and Magdalena Romanuk. According to the Embassy, their status was changed to “supervised liberty”– meaning that their movement is still restricted, but that they are no longer in jail.
A 38-year-old attorney, Zareceansky had been in custody for five years. Miss Kon, a medical student, had been detained since 1978, and Mrs. Romanuk was imprisoned in 1976. The three cases have been pursued over the last few years by ADL’s Argentine Prisoner Project, headed by Rosenthal.
By means of publicity and representations to governmental authorities, the Prisoner Project seeks to obtain the release of people held without charges under the military junta’s National Executive Power (PEN) and to locate those who have disappeared.
BACKGROUND OF THE CASES
Zareceansky’s case, the subject of a four-year ADL effort, was one of those featured in the November, 1981, edition of ADL’s Argentine Prisoner Project brochure, “Why Are These People in Argentina Jails? Where Are the Disappeared?” The cases of the two women were included in the March, 1982, supplement of the brochure.
Zareceansky and his wife, Silvia, were arrested July 25, 1977. Silvia now lives in Spain, where she moved after her release in October, 1978. Zareceansky was at the time of his arrest a professor of law at the University of Cordoba and administrator of its School of Social Welfare.
The parole of Mogdolena Romanuk is deemed especially significant by Rosenthal because she was one of 18 prisoners whose petitions for writs of habeas corpus were denied by two Argentinian federal judges on March II.
“We hope this decision by the Argentine government signals the forthcoming release of the other 17, among whom are two on whose behalf we have made repeated appeals,” Rosenthal said. He identified the two as Isaac Rudnik Ortiz and Juan Alberto Epstein, both detained since 1975.
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