Previous Story
Transitory CPC dismissed the nine judges of the Constitutional Court
Posted On 24 Aug 2018
Ecuadornews:
“The people had many hopes that have not been met” by the Constitutional Court (CC), said Julio César Trujillo Thursday, after deciding with the vote of four other members of the Council of Citizen Participation and Social Control (CPC) cease to function the nine judges that make up the Court.
Alfredo Ruiz, Tatiana Ordeñana, Francisco Butiñá, Manuel Viteri, Marien Segura, Roxana Silva, Wendy Molina, Pamela Martínez and Ruth Seni, who are part of the highest constitutional control body of the State, have three days to file a motion for review to revoke this decision.
The affirmative votes were from Trujillo, Pablo Dávila, Eduardo Mendoza, Myriam Félix and Luis Hernández; the abstention of Xavier Zavala and the absence of Luis Macas, who was going to participate through Skype, because he is out of the country, but the connection just failed.
The plenary session, which was called for 10:00, started 46 minutes late. Zavala was the first to arrive. The last, Trujillo and Dávila.
In the resolution of 222 pages, the CPC argued that they are not violating article 431 of the Constitution, because “the figure of removal is not being applied” and a “political trial, which is the competence of the National Assembly, is not being carried out. ” “Management is being evaluated,” described the brief read by Secretary Darwin Seraquive, which took almost three hours.
It was added that the Council “is not a court of appeal, the only effect of the evaluation is the early cessation, no jurisdictional power is exercised”.
With these arguments they rejected the warnings of judges like Ruiz, Molina, Ordeñana, Butiñá, who last Friday, during the presentation of the evidence of a negative evaluation report, emphasized that the Council is not competent to evaluate them; and in doing so, they would generate that transnationals that lost demands in the Court initiate actions against the State.
But the transitory determined that the judges did not comply with the parameters established in the Evaluation Mandate.
They did not comply with being independent and showed lack of legitimacy of the position.
The reason: his election was born of a contest made by a Qualifying Commission, which did not verify that the magistrates comply with numerals 4 and 5 of article 433 of the Constitution, on having probity and ethics, and not having belonged in the last ten years to the board of any political party or movement.
The “principle of independence and reasonable time” was ignored to address the causes, especially those raised by citizens. According to official statistics, there would be 10,500 processes not processed.
As examples, the request for prior consultation in Quimsacocha (Azuay) to avoid mining took three years. Or the Satya case, which took six.
At the end of the act, Trujillo explained that the evaluation report was delayed because they wanted to record the “reasons” and the “importance of the topic”. Above all, because it is “nothing less than against the Constitutional Court”.(I)
