Last edited: February 14, 2005


Cetiner Release Confirmed

NewsPlanet, Friday, March 27, 1998

NewsPlanet Staff

SUMMARY: Amnesty now has confirmation that the Romanian lesbian is free at last...now on to the remaining "sodomites" in captivity!

Amnesty International has confirmed the release from prison of its Romanian lesbian "prisoner of conscience," Mariana Cetiner, and has scheduled a meeting with her and one of its members in Bucharest next week. A brief wire service report had appeared previously in the British press announcing her release March 25 from a 3-year sentence for attempting to seduce another woman. Further confirmation is significant because earlier this month Romanian government officials had advised Amnesty on two separate occasions that she had been released March 3, but representatives from the Helsinki Committee's Association for Human Rights in Romania actually met with her in Aiud Penitentiary on March 10.

Cetiner was granted a pardon by Romanian President Emil Constantinescu, in the first demonstration of his late-January promise to representatives of Human Rights Watch and the International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Commission that he would grant pardons to all prisoners convicted under the nation's much-protested sodomy statutes. By law, each of those prisoners must make an individual application to him for pardon.


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