The press also asked the Human Development CEO about the latest in the case of that tragic fire at the Youth Hostel at the end of November 2015. You'll remember it as the one where 3 teenaged girls perished after they were padlocked inside and couldn't escape.
The Ministry conducted its own internal investigation about what went wrong to cause these girls to be locked in without adult supervision, and the outcome was that several of the employees were fired. Alpuche told us that there is also a Coroner's Inquest which has been conducted to determine if there should be any criminal sanctions:
Judith Alpuche, CEO, Ministry of Human Development
"There's a coroner's inquest that is just being completed and we're awaiting the results of that to see if anybody will be held criminally liable. From our perspective we took the disciplinary action that was under our control to take. In terms of the people who we fired, people who were directly involved in the incident. There are some people who come under the purview of the public service commission so that is their purview, not ours. We're really waiting to see what the coroner's inquest will yield. we're fully incorporated with that, in fact from the ministry's perspective its welcomed, because from the beginning we've said we want people to look objectively at this whole situations and that's exactly what the coroner's inquest is set up to do. The chief justice in his capacity as supreme coroner 
ordered that a coroner's inquest be done so that's the legal aspect of it. So our report was more for administrative purposes for us to look at the institution and where the break downs occurred so that we can take corrective actions. We had promised to share that report and I would have loved to but one of the pieces of strong advice that we got from the solicitor general's chambers was that if we go out there with this report, it could be prejudicial to any kind of disciplinary action that would be taken. We held off for that purpose, but in terms of what the results of the recommendations coming in from the report was very validating to us because it was a lot of fit between our plans and what the recommendations said. So we incorporated some more of the recommendations because there were some very excellent points to strengthen our own system and we've taken those on board."
The CEO told us that the inquest is should be completed very soon.
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