As planned, judge Eleonora Arenas will examine this Monday from 9 a.m. (1 p.m. in France) the request for dismissal filed by the lawyers of Hugo Auradou and Oscar Jegou. According to our information, the Argentine courts in fact rejected this Friday, during a hearing at the judicial center of Mendoza (Argentina), the new appeal presented by the women's counsel accusing the rugby players of aggravated rape in a meeting.
They wanted the magistrate to be challenged, that is to say relieved of the case, due, according to them, to a “latent risk of lack of impartiality”. With its decision, Argentine justice therefore reaffirms its confidence in Eleonora Arenas. “This is excellent news,” says Rafael Cuneo Libarona, the players’ lawyer. At the beginning of September, a first request for recusal filed by the plaintiff's counsel – this time targeting the prosecutors in charge of the case – had already been rejected.
In a five-page document sent to Dario Noria, the magistrate in charge of the investigation, the representatives of the French deplored even before the court's decision “unfounded requests from the prosecution, whose sole and obvious aim” would be , according to them, to “make the procedure last even longer”.
If the dismissal of the case – the most likely hypothesis today – was pronounced at the end of the closed hearing scheduled for this Monday, the plaintiff's lawyers would have three working days to appeal the decision to of the Collegiate Court of Mendoza, formed by three judges. What Natacha Romano, representative of the alleged victim, intends to do, as she has already announced.
According to the Argentine Penal Code, a possible confirmation of the dismissal of the case on appeal would close “definitively and irrevocably” the judicial process and would mean, in the case of a total abandonment of the charges, “the dismissal of the case”. Or the absolute exoneration of the accused.
Free but still indicted to this day, Pau second line Hugo Auradou and La Rochelle third line Oscar Jegou, both aged 21, have proclaimed their innocence since the start of this affair. The two French players, who returned to the Top 14 in recent weeks, acknowledge a consensual sexual relationship with the alleged victim – a woman from the South American country – but categorically deny any form of violence.
The facts with which they are accused allegedly took place on the night of July 6 to 7 in a luxury hotel in Mendoza, after a test match won by the Blues against the Pumas (28-13).
