The former judge considers that the opinion is an example of “lawfare”, a concept that he translated into Spanish as “judicial war” or “legal war”
The Spanish former judge and jurist Baltasar Garzón assured this Friday that the sentenced to eight years in prison for bribery issued by the Justice of Ecuador against former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017) was preconceived with the aim of convicting him and preventing him from being a candidate in the elections. 2021 elections.
In a conference offered in the city of Guayaquil during a seminar on the Bribery case, in whose sentence Correa and other high-ranking officials of his Government were convicted, Garzón considered that the ruling is an example of “lawfare“, a concept that he translated into Spanish as “judicial war” or “legal war”.
“The ‘lawfare’ is the perversion of the concept of law. The judges and prosecutors that we have exercised as such have the obligation to denounce this phenomenon. We are not political participants in the leadership of a State. We cannot lend the right to someone who heads the institutions of a country,” Garzón said.
In the Judgment of the Bribery case, which has been final since 2020, Correa was declared guilty of bribery as the indirect author (with control and knowledge of the fact) of the illegal financing of the ruling party Alianza País through improper contributions from companies.
According to Garzón, in that judicial opinion “there is a pre-constitution of facts and a sentence that had an objective incompatible with the rational, proportional and contrasted interpretation of Law”.
Garzón, who in his conference analyzed the judgment in the Bribery case from the perspective of international law, maintained that the conviction of Correa, who currently resides in Belgium, It is part of a judicialization of politics to, through the administration of justice, achieve political goals or objectives.
Sentence “incomprehensible”
For Garzón, the sentence is “incomprehensible, and when a sentence is incomprehensible, it is determined by the fact that the selection of the objectives has occurred before, and that is dangerous”since it does not find in it the accreditation and verification of the commission of a punishable conduct.
“We have almost reached a kind of objective imputation for the position. Rafael Correa was upstairs and he had to know everything that happened downstairs, real or not real, but we awarded everything to him, because Objectively, that result was wanted.”Garzon noted.
The former Spanish judge also criticized the fact that the testimonies of effective collaborators (awarded informers) without proving their statements with evidence or hiring other witnesses.
“It is based on a testimony given without any type of guarantees in an investigation phase, where these affirmations are taken as the word of the Most High, and that has been going on for many years. in no democratic state is it accepted that this is the casenot even in cases of gender-based violence,” Garzón said.
“They are not the word of God”, Garzón added when indicating that “the testimony of the co-defendants is not enough for a conviction by itself, it has to be corroborated and take other elements that lead us to the absolute certainty that this has happened like this.”
“Against Progressive Leaders”
Garzón asserted that “normally, that instrumentalization (of Justice) is produced against popular leaders and progressive governments that try to do something different in favor of the most disadvantaged classes, to advance in the consolidation of rights”.
As an example of his statement, he cited the case of the newly elected president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio “Lula” Da Silva, where Garzón pointed out to the judge sergio moro to “decide, in collusion with the Public Prosecutor and its manager, to establish a series of mechanisms to produce an immediate result”.
The jurist recalled that Lula Da Silva could not run in the 2018 elections because he was in jail, and that this had consequences both for Brazil and for the rest of the world, with “planetary impacts on ecosystems” before “Jair Bolsonaro’s ultra-post-fascism policies”.
In the international seminar “Bribery Case”, organized with the endorsement of the Bolivarian University of Ecuador (UBE), the Distance University of Madrid (Udima) and the Ecuadorian Peninsula State University of Santa Elena (UPSE), the Argentine lawyer also participated Eugenio Raul Zaffaroni and the lawyer Vanessa Zavala.