Since early 2026, Salvadoran courts have begun convicting people in mass trials of hundreds of defendants at a time, relying on weak evidence and giving them no real chance to defend themselves, Human Rights Watch said today.
For months, courts in El Salvador have held mass trials of people detained under the state of emergency, which has been in place for over four years. Many people have been sentenced for "unlawful association," a vaguely defined crime, on the basis of weak evidence in closed proceedings that are kept under judicial seal. Lawyers representing the accused say they have had no meaningful chance to contest evidence or prepare an adequate defense. The prosecutors and judges involved have little, if any, independence from the executive branch.
"El Salvador's mass trials are a mockery of justice," said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. "These hearings are designed to produce guilty verdicts, not to weigh evidence under due process. The result is not accountability for the victims of gang violence, it is simply rubber stamping the mass incarceration under four years of the state of emergency."
Human Rights Watch interviewed 15 private defense lawyers representing people detained during the state of emergency and reviewed four indictments covering over 600 defendants and one judicial decision sentencing over 120 people. Researchers also interviewed members of civil society organizations with direct knowledge of the proceedings and, for a prior publication, several police officers whose descriptions of investigations were generally consistent with those of defense lawyers. Human Rights Watch also reviewed publications by the Salvadoran government and by Salvadoran and international news outlets describing the mass trials. Human Rights Watch also requested information from the Salvadoran Supreme Court and the Attorney General's Office about the criminal proceedings of people detained under the state of emergency, including the total number of convictions and the number of people held in pretrial detention. The Attorney General's Office responded that the requested records "were not found." The Supreme Court had not responded at time of writing.
Since March 2022, El Salvador has been under a state of emergency that suspends some due process rights, a measure cast as a necessary tool to fight gang violence. Security forces have detained over 93,000 people, including more than 3,000 children. Human Rights Watch has documented widespread abuses, including arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, torture and other forms of ill-treatment in detention, and severe due process violations. Many people with no connection to gang activities have been detained.
Lawyers said they were routinely blocked from mounting an adequate defense. They said judges denied them access to case files, saying that the cases were under "seal." They also said they could not speak with their clients privately. Some lawyers also said that prosecutors had threatened proposed defense witnesses with criminal prosecution.
Defense lawyers said that judicial proceedings are conducted at such a fast pace that respecting due process is virtually impossible. "It is macabre," one said. "They need the machine to run like clockwork." They described being given only minutes at hearings to present a defense: about 10 minutes at the initial hearing and just 15 minutes at the sentencing hearing. Public defenders, they said, were given a few minutes to represent dozens and, in some instances, hundreds of defendants at a time.
The lawyers interviewed said that prosecutors routinely relied on police reports to seek convictions. Police officers have previously told Human Rights Watch that many police reports are based on fabricated or uncorroborated evidence, such as anonymous calls, and that police were pressed to produce them to comply with an arrest quota.
Prosecutors have also relied on anonymous testimony by witnesses who entered plea agreements. These witnesses testify behind screens or wooden partitions, with their voices distorted. "You don't see them," one lawyer said. "They are covered in a little box; you see a wooden board. The voice is distorted. Only the judge, the court clerk, and the prosecutor have access."
"We presented witnesses, family members, neighbors, who would testify he was not a gang member," a lawyer said about her defense of a young man who has been in detention for more than four years accused of being a "gang collaborator." "They are intimidated by the prosecutor's office, which threatened to detain them."
The trials have been conducted before the Tribunals Against Organized Crime, which have been staffed by the Supreme Court through an ad hoc, opaque process. The identity of these judges has not been disclosed, even to the lawyers involved in the proceedings. One lawyer said that a judge opened a mass hearing by saying: "We are here to convict all MS-13 members."
An estimated 120,000 people are incarcerated in El Salvador today. That amounts to roughly 2 percent of the population, one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. Salvadoran prisoners have long suffered from overcrowding, violence, and inadequate access to food, water, and medical care. The state of emergency has sharply worsened these dire detention conditions by tripling the prison population, pushing it to more than double the system's capacity. At least 513 people have died under state custody during the state of emergency, according to Cristosal, a human rights organization. Over 90 percent of people behind bars have been imprisoned for years awaiting trial, in part because of recent legal reforms that extended pretrial detention terms.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights, to which El Salvador is a party, guarantee everyone charged with a crime the right to be informed promptly and in detail of the charges against them, to have adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense, and to examine prosecution witnesses and present their own on equal terms.
Salvadoran authorities should ensure proceedings comply with fair trial standards, carefully assess the evidence and charges against each individual, end the excessive use of pretrial detention and judicial seals, and disclose how the specialized tribunals were appointed.
The Salvadoran government should also establish an independent, transparent mechanism to review the cases of people detained during the state of emergency and identify people who have been detained without adequate credible evidence, whom authorities should promptly release. The mechanism should prioritize reviewing cases of children, people with disabilities, pregnant women, and people with serious health conditions.
"The government has built a system designed to convict hundreds at once, with no mechanism to separate the innocent from the guilty," Goebertus said.
Vague Accusations, Weak Evidence
Many of the people sentenced in El Salvador's mass trials have been accused of the vaguely defined crime of "unlawful association," based on weak and uncorroborated evidence.
The offense criminalizes not only those who create, lead, or finance gangs, but also anyone who "promotes, helps, facilitates or favors" such groups, or receives a direct or indirect benefit from a relationship "of any nature" with them, even without being a member.
Human Rights Watch found that prosecutors have classified defendants by their alleged rank or role in gangs, in most cases as "collaborators" or "lookouts," but have not further specified what activities specific defendants allegedly engaged in as part of the gang, or during what time periods.
The indictments reviewed relied heavily on a set of recurring documents produced by the police: the arrest report, a police report about the defendant, and photographs taken when the detainee enters prison. In many cases, prosecutors also relied on testimony from one or two anonymous witnesses who entered plea deals.
Lawyers said that the crime has at times been applied to sentence people who were gang victims. "In El Salvador, many people were coerced into 'collaborating' with gangs," one lawyer said. "For example, prosecutors accused one woman of being the girlfriend of a gang leader, when in fact she had been forced into the relationship out of fear for her own life and the lives of her family members." Human Rights Watch reviewed a judgment of a single mass trial in which over 120 people were convicted for "unlawful association." Nobody was acquitted. Defendants were sentenced to either 30 or 45 years in prison. Almost all of those sentenced to 30 years were accused only of being "collaborators," the lowest level of gang association under Salvadoran law.
For the vast majority, the only evidence connecting them to a gang was a statement by one of two anonymous witnesses, who had received immunity from prosecution, together with police paperwork recording the arrest and a police-generated "criminal profile" of the defendant. Even when witnesses said that some of the defendants were fishermen, housewives, farmers, or students, and had no connection with gangs, the judge concluded, without explaining why, that the anonymous witnesses were more credible and convicted the defendants.
Lawyers said that prosecutors frequently rely on the police report as the key piece of evidence, even though the defense is often unable to verify how it was created or the underlying sources used to create it. "Prosecutors say a person is a gang member because a police officer says so," a lawyer said. "The prosecutor relies on the police report, and the police report relies on unspecified official intelligence or public rumors," he added.
Lawyers said police logs of the anonymous calls that allegedly trigger many arrests are not disclosed to the defense, making it impossible to even verify what was said.
Several lawyers said prosecutors have also relied on witnesses who reached plea bargain agreements and then put forward broad, unverifiable allegations of gang membership. Lawyers said that in many cases the witnesses are unable to provide any meaningful details that might give credibility to their allegations. One lawyer said a protected witness described his client as a "lookout who moved drugs," but was unable to specify when, where, with whom, or what kind of drugs.
Severe Restrictions on the Right to Defense
Lawyers consistently described a series of severe limitations on their ability to defend their clients.
Many said that defense lawyers, especially public defenders, are given just minutes to present a defense at multiple stages of the proceedings-from initial hearings on pretrial detention to opening and closing arguments during trials-in some cases for hundreds of defendants at a time. One lawyer described an initial pretrial detention hearing in which a single public defender was given 10 minutes to defend 102 defendants.
Another described a pretrial detention hearing, which he attended, where a public defender had between 20 and 30 minutes to present his defense for 200 defendants. A private defense lawyer said that in one hearing he was given between 30 and 40 seconds to defend his client. Defense arguments are "a mere formality," one said.
