The complex case of Juana Rivas, which has been dragging through the courts for 10 years, although the first complaints date back to 2009, has cleared up one of the two judicial unknowns that were still open in Italy, the civil route. The Court of Cassation, equivalent to the Supreme Court, has confirmed that the custody of her minor son, Daniel, 12 years old, belongs to his father, the Italian Francesco Arcuri, after rejecting the last appeal filed by the Spanish woman. According to the ruling, Rivas “is an unstable person who uses the children in a conflict she maintains with the father, while he guarantees care, stability, and proper social integration,” reports Efe.
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It is the end of a very long file, with the slowness that too often afflicts Italian justice, in which the first initial decision in that sense by the Court of Appeal of Cagliari in 2019 was already annulled by the Court of Cassation and gave Rivas the reason. The process started again, and the Sardinian court decided the same again in January 2025. Finally, the Italian high court has ended up ratifying the decision, as announced this Tuesday by Rivas’s legal team.
“We will go to international courts to examine the response that the Italian and Spanish courts, civil and criminal, are giving to a case that began more than ten years ago, and that has become a legal labyrinth that is destroying the lives of Daniel, Gabriel, and Juana,” stated in a communiqué the Aránguez law firm, which represents Juana Rivas. The reference to international justice is to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), based in Strasbourg.
However, this is only one of the open judicial fronts. One remains in Italy, the criminal trial against Arcuri for mistreatment of his children, which in case of conviction could reopen the custody issue of Daniel; and another in Spain, the complaint against Rivas for child abduction in 2025.
In Sardinia, a criminal trial has been underway since September 2025 that over the years has intersected with the custody case, without affecting it, since according to Italian law a criminal case against a person does not suspend the custody of a minor in their care ― as Spanish legislation does, although it is not always enforced ―. In this process, which is still in the witness testimony phase and will continue after the summer, Arcuri is being tried for alleged mistreatment of Daniel and his older brother. The sentence is expected by the end of the year or early next year, and sources from Rivas’s defense in Italy confirm that, if it were a conviction, it would reopen the custody issue of the minor son.
This trial is also marked by a huge delay, since initially the complaints were dismissed and reopened years later. Since 2017, Rivas filed numerous complaints of mistreatment of her children against her ex-partner in Sardinia, but they were always archived by the Sardinian Prosecutor’s Office without any verification or diligence, according to the Spanish woman’s lawyers. The prosecutors’ decision may have been influenced by Rivas’s conviction in Spain in 2018 for child abduction. However, the General Prosecutor’s Office of Cagliari reviewed the case, saw indications of a crime, took it over directly in 2022, and ordered it to be reopened. Moreover, later even the Cagliari Attorney General himself wrote to Rivas’s lawyer in June 2024 to apologize for “the unacceptable delay.” The judge decided to open a process in May 2025, and it finally started in September.
The statement from Rivas’s legal team referred to this whole process as another aspect, in their opinion, incomprehensible: “We have filed all possible appeals to avoid what in our opinion is an outrage: that a child has to live with and depend on his father, sitting on the bench for mistreating him. (…) It is a new inconsistency in this long process, in which fundamental rights of children and victims of the crime enshrined in national and European regulations are being violated.”
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Over these years Daniel has always been with his father and continues to be, in his home in Carloforte, Sardinia. His brother Gabriel, upon reaching adulthood, decided to live with his mother and in the current trial underway in Italy for mistreatment has testified against his father. This Monday afternoon Juana Rivas sent a letter to the media in which she claimed she had not been able to speak by phone with her minor son for a year. Arcuri’s lawyers denied this and assured that there has been no impediment on their part.
During these years Rivas had the right to visit her children regularly in Italy and some days of custody in Spain. Until last year, when the last incident occurred that again put the media spotlight on the case. In July 2025, the Spanish justice ordered that the minor son be handed over to the father, after Rivas refused to send him back to Italy during the Christmas holidays and he finished the rest of the school year in Spain.
It was the second time the same thing happened. The case came to light in 2016, when Rivas left Italy with her two children and returned to Maracena, her town in Granada, and reported her partner for mistreatment. However, she was finally convicted of child abduction in July 2018, for not allowing the minors to return to their father at Christmas. She was sentenced in the first instance to five years in prison, then reduced to two and a half years. Later, in 2021, she received a partial pardon from the Government that reduced the sentence to one year and three months and she was released.
This precedent is what makes the new incident a year ago, in which Arcuri again filed a complaint against his ex-partner for child abduction, another process still open in Spain in the Granada Court, able to invalidate the pardon. One of the conditions was precisely not to commit the same crime within four years. The outcome of this procedure will again mark the case.
In reality, the story goes much further back. Rivas first reported mistreatment by her partner in 2009, and Arcuri was sentenced to three months in prison with a restraining order. They already had the older son, but then they reconciled and went to live in Sardinia, where the second son was born. The conflict resurfaced in 2016, when she left the family home and went with the children to Spain. That was when it became public.