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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