The 1st instance Court highlighted alleged contradictions and other circumstances that in its discretion, justified dismissing those testimonies, as well as any probatory value thereof.
However, the appellate Court considered that those contradictions were not such, and that the alleged inconsistencies in the testimonies of the victim-witnesses could not serve to justify the exclusion of the said testimonies as evidence.
The Court emphasized the need to assess the context of the case, in which the witnesses were themselves victims of trafficking. Thus, the Court considered that the impact generated by that experience on the victims and the other characteristics of the human trafficking phenomenon, justifies a special assesment of the testimonies of the victims. Therefore, the Court found that human trafficking and the violence surrounding it produces a psichological confusion in the exploited women, which in turn, generates denial and dissociation in them, and act as a trigger to other symptoms such as depersonalization, altered perception of temporality or memory loss, indifference to suffering violence and fragmentation of perception, feelings, consciousness and memory.
In this regard, the importance attributed by the Court to the testimony of the psychologist of the Rescue Office, Z. Consequently, the Court analysed the assesment made by the 1st instance Court in the contested decision, of the testimonies of the witnesses who claimed they had seen M. The Court held that the Criminal Chamber had omitted, in the assessment of the various testimonies, to undertake a human trafficking perspective or approach.
For example, in relation to the supposed contradiction and subsequent discarding of several statements based on the allegedly conflicting dates on which the witnesses claimed they had seen the victim in different places, the Court held that the 1st instance Court had not taken into account the effects caused by the phenomenon of human trafficking on the victims, which can alter the temporal perception of the exploited women, which in this case was reinforced by a context of confinement, isolation and drugs.
