Controlling the Supreme Court

The Honduran Supreme Court last week rolled over and offered its belly to Congress, voting 10-3 to open a disciplinary investigation into justice Marco Zuniga.

Zuniga, you will recall, wrote a scathing letter which he made public to chief justice Jorge Rivera Aviles in which he accused Rivera Aviles of being an alcoholic.

The Supreme Court vote came shortly after Congress threatened to dismiss Zuniga if he maintained his confrontational attitude with Rivera Aviles.  The threat came from Congressman Oswaldo Ramos Soto, chief author of many of the laws the previous Constitutional Branch of the Supreme Court found unconstitutional.  Ramos Soto says that Congress gave Rivera Aviles special powers to have full authority over personnel within the court, to re-assign justices to other positions within the Supreme Court, and to appoint the new council that will in the future, review and appoint judges. 

Ramos Soto said:

It's too bad that in the highest court of justice you have this type of problems.  I recommend to the magistrates involved that they moderate their tempers, calm down, because if it comes to Congress, Congress is ready to make the call, including firing them for insubordination in the Court.

The Supreme Court took the action of opening an disciplinary investigation into justice Marco Zuniga after voting 10-3 to confirm that Chief Justice Rivera Aviles was authorized by Congress to move judges around between the branches of the court, an unprecedented action.  Neither Rivera Aviles nor Marco Zuniga participated in the voting.

Congressional threats are not limited to the Supreme Court.  Now that Congress has given itself the power to remove anyone in government, it is considering removing the Public Prosecutor, Luis Rubí, who has a lousy investigation and conviction record. 

During the discussion of a revision to the law code to address hate crimes against women, Juan Orlando Hernandez said:

In advance, I tell you, I would not take it badly that as we are evaluating the performance of the Supreme Court and the Police, that this be done with the public prosecutors.

Marvin Ponce has said Rubí will be the first political justice case tried under the new law. 

This statement comes just after the Comisión de Reforma de la Seguridad Pública (CSRP) issued a report requesting the anti-corruption prosecutor be removed for corruption and incompetence, and a second report supposedly financed by the US Embassy was produced, recommending a complete reorganization of the public prosecutor's office. 

Marvin Ponce, vice president of Congress, confirmed he's heard of these reports, but the actions that might be taken are just rumors.

As Rafael Padilla of the Lawyers Against Corruption said:

The tragedy of Honduras is that justice is political, not legal, a product of the autocratic government that prevails.

As if to underscore Padilla's point, the Supreme Court ruled 9-4 with two abstentions to uphold the police cleanup law, the very same law that the four justices illegally fired by Congress said was unconstitutional because it failed to provide for the due process rights of the accused. So Congressional moves to remove justices who dared to disagree with them worked: from here on, expect Congress to be able to act with impunity.

Model Cities Update

The Honduran press has been full of news about Model Cities over the last couple of weeks.

As our readers will recall, the oversight and transparency commission, headed by Paul Romer resigned en masse because they were shut out of the negotiations with Grupo MGK, and when they asked, denied permission to review the Memorandum of Understanding between Honduras and this group.

This lack of transparency seems not to bother Porfirio Lobo Sosa one bit.  With the removal of Romer and the other "transparency commission" members from the oversight and approval process, this means that the Honduran Congress has all the oversight  and approval power in the Model Cities process.

In a 50 minute interview with Michael Strong on a libertarian internet radio program on September 10, we learned that Strong plans that his model city will be in the valley around San Pedro Sula, and is not interested in the other locations being discussed.  So much for idea that model cities would be in uninhabited areas: the San Pedro Sula area is the business and industrial center of the country, a region already host to many free enterprise zones (maquilas). San Pedro itself is the country's second-largest city.

Michael Strong is not proposing to build Paul Romer's vision of a model city.

Strong's vision differs, he says, in four key ways.  First, it is based on the entrepeneurial model he says rules in Silicon Valley:  start small and when that works, scale it up.  In Strong's Free City, residents have access to the best laws without having to be governed by foreigners.  Strong sees this as more respectful of local autonomy and sovereignty than Romer's model. Third, the governor, a Honduran, chooses what legal systems are available to the residents. Thus residents can have contracts based on Honduran law, or, as Strong advocated in the interview, on Texas business law, because that is the closest to the 19th century ideal he favors.  Strong says, finally, that his model does not rely on a land grant from the Honduran government, but rather purchases the land to increase its size as needed.

There are signs that this normally rubber-stamp Honduran Congress is restless about the Model Cities project, however.

Juan Orlando Hernandez, the head of the Congress, and  a presidential candidate for the National Party, announced this week that any vote establishing the bounds of the land for Grupo MGK would be delayed until after the primary elections in November.  Ostensibly, the reason was that there were then 24 legal challenges to the law filed with the Supreme Court-- a number now much, much higher.

Practically, model cities are a political hot potato with the electorate.  Moving the vote after the primary elections may also be intended to prevent voter backlash.

Meanwhile, Hernandéz main legislation writing proxy in the Congress is hard at work, trying to fix the flaws in the law, presumably so that after the primaries, Hernandéz and company can proceed with their ever-evolving introduction of new colonialism in Honduras.

Where is Lempira when you need him?

Legal Challenges to Model Cities Law Proliferate

The law in Honduras that enables the Regiones Especiales de Desarrollo (RED), better known in English as model cities, is facing increasing opposition from Honduran citizens. 

The constitutionality of the law was first challenged in October, 2011 by the Asociación de Juristas para la Defensa del Estado de Derecho (Association of Jurists for the Defense of the Rule of Law).

Fourteen challenges against the model cities enabling law were filed on September 18, 2012. These fourteen challenges were filed on behalf of 14 separate individuals, including Miriam Miranda Chamorro, head of Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña  (OFRANEH), a Garifuna organization.

On September 18, the Public Defender of the Constitution, a prosecutor with the Public Prosecutor's office, filed a brief with the Supreme Court on an October 2011 case challenging the constitutionality of the law. The Honduran Supreme Court solicits the opinion of the Defender of the Constitution whenever there is a constitutional challenge present in a case before the Supreme Court.  A legal countdown clock has now started, that by law gives the Supreme Court's Constitutional group of five judges just 20 days to render an opinion in that first legal challenge from October, 2011.

Nine more challenges to the constitutionality of the law were filed with the Honduran Supreme Court on September 21, 2012.  Eight of these were filed by the Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras (COPINH, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations) and the nineth by Father Fausto Milla, a Catholic priest in the Lenca region of Honduras.

On September 25, the LGBT community filed 30 more challenges to the constitutionality of the Regiones Especiales de Desarrollo law.

On September 26, a further 22 challenges against the law were filed.  One of these was by the Colectivo de Mujeres Hondureñas (Collective of Honduran Women), and the rest by individuals challenging the legislation.

For those of you keeping score, that's 76 separate challenges to the constitutionality of the RED legislation.

And that's not the only bad news. The Honduran Congress apparently agrees that the law, as written, is unconstitutional.

Oswaldo Ramos Soto, who drafted the existing RED law and is  Juan Orlando Hernandez's go-to guy for writing legislation, is preparing to introduce an amendment which will "fix" the unconstitutional parts of the law.

Ramos Soto wants to change Article 1 of the RED law to make it clear that the judicial system in the RED is still answerable to the Supreme Court, which is the court of last resort in Honduras.

Ramos Soto also wants to strip away the treaty-making power granted the model city in the existing law.  He proposes changing Article 18 to remove any mention of treaties, and to give to Congress the power to appoint judges in the model city. 

Ramos Soto also proposes changing Article 19 to make the legal system in a RED part of the Honduran judicial system, under the authority of the Supreme Court.

The net effect of Ramos Soto's proposed changes would be to gut one of the key features of Paul Romer's model cities: their judicial independence from the host country.

Both Romer and Michael Strong have argued that it is the legal systems in the host countries that are in part responsible for the poverty in them and the lack of economic development.

The experiment seems to be on the way to being over before it even began.