Havana, Sep 11 (EFE).– The Cuban government will pardon 3,522 prisoners on the occasion of Pope Francis’s visit to the island, according to a State Council agreement reported Friday in official media.

The official announcement said the pardons will take effect within the next 72 hours for prisoners over 60 and under 20 years of age without criminal records, the chronically ill, women, inmates scheduled to be released on parole in 2016, as well as foreigners whose homelands guarantee their repatriation.

Taken into account when the pardons were granted – a measure also effected for the papal visits of John Paul II in 1998 and Benedict XVI in 2012 – was “the nature of the incidents” for which those prisoners were sentenced, their behavior in jail, the state of their health and how much of their penalty has been completed.

Not included in the list of those pardoned, according to the official note, were inmates sentenced for the crimes of assassination, homicide, rape, pederasty with violence, the corruption of minors, the rustling and illegal slaughtering of livestock, drug trafficking, robbery with violence and intimidation, and crimes against state security “except in certain cases for humanitarian reasons.”

The Interior Ministry will coordinate with the Labor & Social Security Ministry, the Public Health Ministry and the administration’s respective provincial councils on “the necessary actions for the social reinsertion and medical attention for those in need of them upon their release.”

In the case of foreigners, the Foreign Ministry will coordinate with the appropriate diplomatic missions in Cuba the measures they must take to assure the final departure from the island of all their citizens who have been pardoned.

Cuba’s Official Gazette published Friday the pardon decree dated Sept. 8 and signed by President Raul Castro, which contains the list of names of the inmates who will benefit from the measure.

Cuba has a prison population of some 57,000 inmates, according to official figures released in 2012, though the dissidence raises that number to between 60,000 and 70,000, according to the opposition Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, or CCDHRN.

That group, led by dissident Elizardo Sanchez, also estimates that there are currently at least 60 people imprisoned for “political reasons or by politically influenced procedures.” EFE