Mexico City Approves "Ingrid Law" To Avoid Re-Victimization

Mexico City’s Congress approved on Tuesday reforms to the local penal code criminalizing the dissemination and reproduction of content from judicial investigations such as a victims’ image. The amendments, also called the Ingrid Law, were named after the femicide of 25-year-old Ingrid Escamilla last year, which sparked outrage against gender violence.

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The law punishes individuals including public servants who “improperly disseminates, delivers, reveals, publishes, transmits, exposes, remotely, distributes, audio-records, photographs, films, reproduces, markets, offers, exchange or share photos, videos, audios or documents of the place of the events or the discovery,” the text highlights.

Moreover, courts will impose penalties from two to six years in prison and fines up to $4,500 on those who violate the legislation. According to authorities, courts could increase sentences by up to a third if evidence emerges that the leakage of images of the bodies of women, children, or adolescents was done to damage the victims and their families’ dignity.

On February 9, 2020, Ingrid Escamilla was killed by her boyfriend at the major’s office. Some media outlets and social media disseminated the corpse’s images, which triggered a wave of public rejection and demonstrations against gender violence. Later, officials found that the photos were leaked by agents of the Attorney General’s Office of Mexico City.

“Respect for the memory of the victims who have been deprived of life is a vital issue. The life of a person who has been violated or the way they die should never be a cause for their re-victimization or further aggravate the damage caused, both to those who suffer it and to the relatives and the community that surrounds them,” the president of the Commission for the Administration of Justice of Congress, Eduardo Santillán Pérez said.