NEW DELHI: India’s Supreme Court Monday rejected an appeal against the release of the youngest convict in a fatal gang-rape, sparking fury from the victim’s parents who said the ruling was a betrayal of women.

Amid growing outrage at the freeing of the 20-year-old, judges said there were no legal grounds to allow a petition by the Delhi Commission for Women, which wanted to reverse his release from a youth correctional facility.

At a hearing presided over by Justice A.K. Goel and U.U. Lalit, the court said “there is nothing in the law” that would allow them to order him back behind bars and he therefore could not be detained any longer.

The ruling was greeted with despair by the parents of the victim, 23-year-old Jyoti Singh, who has become the symbol of the plight of women in a country with frightening levels of sexual violence.

“There are no words to describe our disappointment,” her father Badrinath Singh told AFP.

“We don’t understand all these laws. We only know that the system has failed us.”

The convict, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was one of a group of six who abducted the young physiotherapy student after she had spent an evening at the movies with a male friend.

Jyoti’s mother, Asha Devi, said Monday’s ruling showed India had “not learned any lessons from this case” and urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to introduce laws with tougher sentences for sex attacks.

“They have basically handed young criminals a license that says before the age of 18 you can rape girls, do whatever you want, because our laws do not have any provisions to punish you,” she told reporters.

“They only care about men... women are only betrayed, like they always have been.”