The Ecuadorian government on Monday protested against Belgian police's imprisonment of an Ecuadorian woman and her 11-year-old daughter for being in the country illegally.
"We cannot tolerate our Ecuadorian sister's mistreatment in a Belgian jail," said Ecuador's Foreign Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa.
"She is an undocumented person, not a criminal," said the minister, adding the woman "should not be sanctioned nor treated as a person who has committed a major crime," said the minister.
Belgian police arrested Ana Cajamarca and her daughter Angelica Loja Cajamarca at a bus stop on June 30, saying they had been living illegally in Belgium for four years. They are currently being held at a detention center and set to be deported on Monday.
Espinosa said that the Foreign Ministry is working on the case and had hired a lawyer in Brussels to help the two.
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and his wife Anne Malherbe visited the two at the jail on Sunday.
Malherbe, a Belgian citizen, told Ecuadorian radio "I feel terribly ashamed for Belgians. I cannot believe that children are jailed in my homeland."
She said she was "surprised to see that the jail housed a lot of children, many younger than Angelica, who are only allowed out of their rooms to play in the jailhouse yard for up to an hour a day.
"We had not thought such things were possible in Belgium," she said.
Source: Xinhua
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