Killing of Nuno Ribeiro

Nuno Miguel Ribeiro de Araujo was a 17-year-old Portuguese boy who was openly homosexual. In the early morning of April 14, 2000, he was beaten to death in an alley in Escaldes-Engordany, Andorra. According to Wikipedia's account of the case, two Spanish youths, aged 20 and 22 — identified as Sergi Ruiz Lázaro and Domingo López Acedo — carried out the attack.

The case drew significant media attention in Andorra due to the severity of the violence involved and the homophobic motivation attributed to the killing. The killing is credited with motivating the creation of Som com Som, an association formed to advocate for LGBTQ rights in Andorra.

Following the killing, Sergi Ruiz Lázaro and Domingo López Acedo were tried before the Tribunal de Corts, which sentenced them to five and sixteen years of imprisonment, respectively. On October 24, 2001, the criminal division of the High Court of Andorra upheld this conviction on appeal.

In May 2002, the Constitutional Court of Andorra partially overturned the conviction. The court found that the original ruling could not be sustained on the basis that the crime violated the dignity of the person, because homophobia was not criminalized under Andorran law at that time. As a result, the sentences of both Sergi Ruiz and Domingo López were reduced by one year each, and their convictions were maintained solely on the charge of murder, rather than on any aggravated basis tied to the homophobic motivation of the crime.

The case is documented in Wikipedia's "Killing of Nuno Ribeiro" entry, which is the primary source for the facts summarized here. Two additional Catalan-language sources are associated with this case as contemporaneous or related coverage: an article from vilaweb.cat concerning autopsy findings, and a report from andorradifusio.ad on the experience of homosexuality in small communities such as Andorra. These two sources are listed as corroborating references cited in the Wikipedia article's reference list, but their specific content was not independently reviewed for this dossier and no additional facts have been drawn from them beyond what appears in the primary Wikipedia source.