Electing a Supreme Court, Badly.

The Honduran Congress is responsible for electing a new Supreme Court every 7 years under the Honduran Constitution.  Yesterday the National and Liberal parties tried to carry on as they have for the last 34 years, nominating a suite of 8 National Party members, and 7 Liberal Party members.  Mauricio Oliva, the president of Congress and a National Party member, then forced the procedure of voting on the entire slate, rather than approving each justice individually.  He was certain he had the votes because of the alliance between the crumbling Liberal Party and the ruling National Party.  He needed 86 votes.  He got 82 (or 84 depending on which Honduran newspaper you read).  Congress failed to appoint a new Supreme Court.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg of corruption around the election of this Supreme Court in Honduras. Lets turn to the candidates themselves.  Last October,  American Bar Association joined the Centro por la Justica y el Derecho Internacional (CEJIL), the Fundacion para el Debido Proceso (DPLF), and Impunity Watch to form an international oversight committee reviewing the election of justices in Honduras.  They met with the nominating committee and held workshops for them on international standards and best practices for selecting justices.  It mostly seems to have been in vain.

The master slate of some 200 candidates was formed by the Nominating committee in a procedure that privileged some institutions, such as the business community, labor unions, and civil society, with making their own nominations.  Others candidates self-nominated.  The list of 200 candidates filled out questionaires, underwent drug testing, answered questions about affiliation or participation in drug trafficking with a polygraph.  Each candidate received a numerical score, and all of this information was supposedly used to winnow the list down to the 45 "best" candidates, if by "best" you include 12 who failed the polygraph test, and some whose legal qualifications are suspect.  During the process, the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa twice submitted lists of candidates that it said required more investigation or that should be eliminated outright, supposedly based on an FBI evaluation of candidates. 

In the end, the Nominating committee submitted a list of 45 candidates to the Honduran Congress, including candidates that failed the polygraph portion of the test, and those that had numeric scores less than 50%.  These are the ones the Nominating Committee said were the "best" candidates, but they refused to make public the selection criteria. 

On January 21, the Human Rights Center of the ABA issued a 9 page report on the work of the Nominating committee, saying that it failed to meet international standards for transparency and follow the best practices for the selection of justices.  So much for those workshops in October.  The ABA said the Nominating committee had made an effort, but had not gone far enough to investigate the candidates, and that the whole process lacked transparency.  They pointed out that the "election" of the Nominating committee itself was problematic.  They made a long list of suggested improvements to the process. 

Once Congress had the list, Mauricio Oliva appointed a review committee of 10 Congress people to review the nominations and recommend a slate of candidates.  The committee was composed of members of the 5 political parties which have Congresspeople, with a majority of the positions going to the National and Liberal parties and the supporting Christian Democrats.  All committee members were selected by Oliva, not their parties.

Monday started badly for transparency when Congress blocked most of the press corp in Honduras from entering to cover the election of the Supreme Court. Blocked press included Padre Melo of Radio Progreso.

The vote failed because Oliva did nothing to court the opposition party members into supporting the slate of hand picked candidates.  He did get 9 votes from opposition party members, but clearly expected more.  After the vote, Salvador Nasralla said that only 5 of the 15 candidates were qualified in his opinion.  PAC, Libre, and PINU have together called for an open, public vote for the Supreme Court candidates, but Mauricio Oliva has instead imposed a secret vote, using paper ballots rather than the electronic voting system in Congress.  Its far easier to manipulate the results of paper ballots, as both the Liberal and National parties have done in the general elections for the last 34 years.

Congress meets again at 4 pm to reportedly reconsider electing the same slate of 15 candidates again, only this time with a secret vote instead of a public one, using paper ballots instead of the electronic voting system installed in Congress.

FNRP New Political Party: Libre

"The revolution is inevitable in Honduras"
- motto of Libre.

Libre is the short form of Libertad y Refundación, the official name of the new political party in Honduras representing the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP). The party will be known by its initials, PLR.

Manuel Zelaya Rosales submitted 80,000 signatures from Honduran citizens supporting the founding of this political party. Earlier this week, the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE) verified 63,000 of these signatures. This puts the party far over the required number of signatures to establish a new party (42,920, according to the announcement by the TSE). The TSE also approved the emblem of the party. The emblem appears on the ballot, helping illiterate voters to recognize the party's candidates.

As part of the process, Zelaya presented the charter of the new party, its electoral plans for the upcoming election, and evidence of organizational structures present in at least half of the 298 municipios of Honduras.

Libre's declaration of principles has been published on (and can be downloaded from) the FNRP website. The document is well worth a close and careful reading; we have posted our own English translation to enable readers to do that.

Among the core principles the party declares is the primacy of popular sovereignty. In the wake of the 2009 coup, the existence in the Honduran Constitution of articles that could not be changed was challenged by constitutional scholars as violating the principle that the authority of a constitution stems from the people. The Frente has, in its own processes, employed direct, participatory deliberation in the Assembly of Popular Power, which is specifically characterized as basic to the project of the new party.

While many aspects of the program proposed are entirely contemporary-- including the firm rejection of neoliberalism, imperialism, and neocolonialism-- the party also calls on specifically Central American roots. As a Morazanic party, it espouses the "dream" of Central American unity and projects that farther, as a basic call for solidarity of all the Latin American and Caribbean peoples of the Americas. Libre specifically calls for respect for religious diversity, secularism, respect for the rights of women, and calls for the eradication of discrimination on the basis of "race, sex, sexual diversity, cultural difference".

Libre is the second new political party registered with the TSE this year. The first belonged to Salvador Nasralla, whose Anti-Corruption Party registered in early October. The Honduran press has taken up the question of whether the founding of new parties will actually change the de facto domination by the Liberal and National parties, and, unsurprisingly, concludes that it will not.

El Heraldo quotes Rafael Pineda Ponce, who was part of the regime of Roberto Micheletti, saying the new parties won't change things: better the old and familiar than the new and unknown, he says the Honduran people will conclude. Of course, Pineda Ponce is busy promoting his own preferred candidate for the Liberal party, who he claims can unite its fractured factions: Mauricio Villeda. He reserves particularly pungent words for members of the Liberal party who also maintain (he thinks) an allegiance to Zelaya:

"O se quedan con Jesucristo o se quedan con Satanás" (They either stay with Jesus or with Satan).

Indeed. Never has the opinion of the Micheletti wing of the Liberal party been clearer. For them, all the principles expressed by Libre are whitewash for a Zelaya movement. And sticking with Zelaya-- well, we'll let you figure out who is Satan in this metaphor.