Peru's Constitutional Court voided Ollanta Humala's 15 year conviction on a question of dates

Peru's Constitutional Court has annulled the entire criminal case against former president Ollanta Humala, erasing a 15 year sentence for aggravated money laundering that the National Superior Court imposed on 16 April 2025. The decision, Sentencia 169/2026 in file 00110-2026-PHC/TC, is dated 15 July 2026 and was published on 30 July. A criminal court ordered his release the following evening, and he walked out of Barbadillo prison in eastern Lima on 31 July after about 15 months inside.

The reasoning turns on a calendar, not on the money. Humala and his wife Nadine Heredia were convicted of laundering close to three million US dollars in undeclared campaign contributions from the Brazilian construction group Odebrecht, now Novonor, and from the Venezuelan government, received during the 2006 and 2011 presidential campaigns. The court's majority held that the specific offence prosecutors relied on, the modality known in Peruvian law as receptacion patrimonial, meaning the receipt and retention of assets of illicit origin, entered the criminal code only through Legislative Decree 1249 in November 2016. Applying it to conduct from 2006 and 2011 was, the majority found, a retroactive and unfavourable use of the criminal law, in breach of the constitutional principles of legality and typicality. The court quoted the guarantee that nobody may be prosecuted or convicted for an act that was not previously defined as punishable when it was committed.

The majority went further than dates. It found that the ordinary courts had never identified the predicate offence, the underlying crime from which the money was said to derive, and that there was no rational basis for concluding that Humala knew or could have presumed an illicit origin at the time. Criminal intent, the ruling said, must be proved objectively rather than inferred from the fact that funds were kept outside the banking system.

Five magistrates carried the decision: Helder Dominguez Haro, who wrote it, Francisco Morales Saravia, Gustavo Gutierrez Ticse, Cesar Ochoa Cardich and Pedro Hernandez Chavez. Luz Pacheco Zerga and Manuel Monteagudo Valdez dissented. Their objection was procedural rather than substantive. They argued the habeas corpus petition was premature, because the conviction was still travelling through the ordinary appeal system and the questions raised belonged inside that process. That disagreement matters, because it is the same fault line the same seven magistrates split along on 21 October 2025, when the court granted Keiko Fujimori's habeas corpus in file 02109-2024-PHC/TC and annulled the Cocteles investigation on identical legality grounds, again five to two, again with Pacheco Zerga and Monteagudo Valdez against.

Constitutional Court judgments in Peru are final and cannot be appealed. The prosecution offered no public response when Humala was released. On 14 August 2026 the Second National Criminal Appeals Chamber executed the ruling, archived the case, and extended its effect to the co accused, including Heredia, whose own 15 year sentence was annulled and whose arrest warrant was lifted, along with Ilan Heredia, Antonia Alarcon, Mario Torres, Rocio Calderon and Eladio Mego. Humala said that day that a damaging chapter of judicial harassment in Peru had closed, and on release described himself as a hostage of the state. Those are his characterisations of the case, not findings of the court.

The context is a prosecution effort that has already produced convictions. Alejandro Toledo, another former Peruvian president, was sentenced to 20 years in October 2024 over 35 million US dollars in bribes tied to the same Odebrecht scheme, which the United States Justice Department has described as the largest foreign bribery case it has resolved. The Humala verdict of April 2025 also carried civil damages of 10 million soles, roughly 2.7 million US dollars, and convicted Ilan Heredia as a co author of aggravated money laundering. All of that is now void as to Humala and his co accused.

Several things remain unknown. It is not clear whether Peru's Congress will legislate to close the gap the court identified, or whether undeclared campaign money from that era is now simply beyond prosecution. It is not clear how many other Lava Jato era cases rest on the same reading and can be unwound the same way. Heredia's lawyer has advised her to remain in Brazil, where she has asylum, and she still faces separate investigations connected to the Southern Gas Pipeline project and to the construction firm OAS. Nothing in the ruling determines whether the money was received. It determines that receiving it was not, at the time, the crime charged.