GUATEMALA: Making the Judge Selection Process More Transparent

• by Danilo Valladares (guatemala city)
• Friday, September 25, 2009
• Inter Press Service

A new law that created committees to nominate candidates for the Supreme Court and the appeals courts for the 2009-2014 period opened up the process to citizen oversight and participation.

The committees, made up of the heads of the country's universities, the deans of university law departments, and delegates from the bar association and the Instituto de Magistrados (which represents judges), drew up short-lists of nominees from more than 1,000 candidates, who were selected based on aspects like their legal careers, academic and professional qualifications, and ethical standing.

The committees, which began their work on Aug. 12, submitted the lists - of 26 Supreme Court candidates and 180 candidates for the appeals courts — to Congress this week.

The legislature has now begun to choose 13 Supreme Court magistrates and 90 appeals court judges, to be appointed on Oct. 13.

Civil society groups are urging Congress to make their vote open, not secret.

Social organisations like the Movimiento Cívico Nacional, Pro Justicia, and Convocatoria Ciudadana worked hard to get the nominating committees to select the candidates with the cleanest records by submitting written complaints rejecting candidates with a murky past.

'We hope the well-documented denunciations were enough to eliminate the candidates in question from the final lists,' Ana María de Klein, a leader of Pro Justicia, which submitted complaints against more than 100 Supreme Court and appeals court candidates, told IPS.

The civil society groups rejected a total of around 300 candidates, most of whom were seeking appeals court positions.

'We filed formal complaints with paperwork containing irrefutable evidence about people who have somehow suffered at the hands of specific judges or lawyers who applied for the positions, as well as press reports,' said de Klein.

The complaints submitted by the social organisations mention involvement by the judges or lawyers in question in illegal adoptions or other corrupt activities, or identify them as having defended drug traffickers in court, for example.

Carlos Castresana, director of the U.N.-sponsored International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) that began to operate in January 2008, told the press that he backed the information that the civil society groups provided the nominating committees.

He also expressed concern that 'it is an open secret that negotiations are taking place outside of the committees.'

The Spanish prosecutor, who had previously refrained from making any statements about the judge selection process, also said that some of the candidates are relatives of people who participated in the selection process, and that members of law firms had graded their own partners.

Early this week, Castresana urged the nominating committees to purge the lists of questionable candidates by Sept. 21. If they did not do so, he said, he would reveal the names of lawyers and judges who have taken part in illegal adoptions or have worked for drug traffickers. However, he has not referred to the matter again.

The selection of judges is crucial in a country that has one of the highest homicide rates in the region - 47 per 100,000 population in 2007, according to the 2008 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Statistical Report on Violence in Guatemala — and where 98 percent of all crimes go unpunished, according to CICIG.

The U.N.-sponsored commission was created to restore trust in corruption-riddled institutions like the police and the justice system. One of the key steps is to assist the Guatemalan public prosecutors' office, the Supreme Court and the police in identifying the existence of illegal, clandestine armed security groups and their possible links to the state, in order to dismantle them.

In court battles, the civil society groups successfully fought for the nominating committees' votes in the selection process for candidates to the courts to be open, rather than secret, as initially planned. Thanks to a court order handed down in a case brought by the Movimiento Cívico Nacional, the votes of each member of the nominating committees were made public.

Nery Rodenas, head of the human rights office of the Catholic archbishopric (ODHA), which belongs to the Convergencia por los Derechos Humanos umbrella group, told IPS that the new law creating the nominating committees was a positive development because it allowed civil society to participate in overseeing the selection process.

'There are more possibilities for change now. There wasn't so much public interest before, and the law has paved the way for citizen oversight. We've seen greater transparency, as murky people have been identified' in the selection process, he said.

But Rodenas said he was concerned about attempts to intimidate members of the nominating committees, which he said were the result of 'the many interests at stake.'

He mentioned the case of the secretary of the appeals court nominating committee, Mireya Barrera, who resigned in late August after she was threatened because of her work.

Guatemala Visible, a coalition of 35 civil society organisations pressing for a more transparent selection process, provided information on both the candidates and the nominating committee meetings on its web site, in Spanish as well as indigenous languages. (More than half of all Guatemalans are Amerindians.)

'While fulfilling the law that gave civil society a new role in holding accountable those involved in the selection process, so that they will elect the most honourable candidates, we have seen a resurgence of civil society,' Carlos Cabarrús, who heads the Guatemala Visible project, told IPS.

Cabarrús, a Jesuit priest, said his work was inspired by the 'Congreso Visible' project carried out since 1998 by the Universidad de los Andes, a university in Colombia, whose mission is to foster citizen participation by monitoring, and providing information on, the performance of the members of Congress.

According to the priest, the participation of young people, who 'are keen on fighting impunity and are even willing to take to the streets,' has been very important in the work of Guatemala Visible.

Alma Aguilar with the Movimiento Paz Joven Guatemala, a young people's peace group, told IPS that '70 percent of the Guatemalan population is young, which means we have a duty to monitor and oversee this process.'

The 23-year-old highlighted the importance of the complaints and information submitted to the nominating committees, and said 'our real concern is to keep people whose records may have been compromised from being appointed instead of those with the best academic and ethical track records.'

The civil society groups acknowledge that it will be no easy task to ensure that the most honourable, best-trained people are selected as judges. But they are sure that the creation of the nominating committees has opened the door to change.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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