Facing the impeachment trial promoted by the front of all against Supreme Court of Justicethe Peronist lawyer and representative of the ruling coalition, Grace Penafortconfirmed that chats involving members of the court will not be used as evidence – Juan Carlos Maqueda, Horacio Rosatti, Carlos Rosenkrantz and Ricardo Lorenzetti – with businessmen and opposition politicians, in what is known as “The Escondido Lake Scandal”. However, the lawyer and general director of Legal Affairs of the Senate of the Nation, announced that “once evidence is presented” against the members of the highest court “it will be very difficult to vote against,” according to what Peñafort told futurerock.
The chats that compromise, among others, the Buenos Aires Minister of Security Marcelo D´Alessandro, cannot be used as evidence, since it is a leak of a private conversation arising from an investigation by the media PROFIL. Due to this, it could not be admitted as evidence, in line with what is known in law as “doctrine of the fruit of the poisoned tree”which establishes that evidence obtained through non-legitimate means may not be used in a legal proceeding.
Instead, the strategy of the ruling party will be aimed at pointing out an alleged favoritism of the Court in favor of the City of Buenos Aires in the dispute over the matching funds: in December, through a ruling, the Court provisionally returned 2.95 percent of the mass of co-participating funds to the Buenos aires citywhich had been redirected to the province in 2020, to solve a conflict with the Buenos Aires police that put provincial security in check.
The other leg of the ruling party’s strategy against the Court will be to seek public support in the human rights organizations to allege faults in this matter by the magistrates. A few days agoMothers of Plaza de Mayo Founding Line, Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, Relatives of the Disappeared and Detained for Political Reasons, CHILDREN Capital, among other organizations, expressed their support for the “presidential initiative to request the Impeachment of the four members of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation”.
Said guarantee is based, according to the position of said organizations, in the “deeply undemocratic actions of this Supreme Court, which has tried to guarantee, by all means, the impunity of the genocidal”, in reference to those who incurred in the disappearance of people during the last military dictatorship. As an example of this, they cite “the criminal procedure popularly called ‘the 2×1’ – controversial ruling that in 2017 sought to shorten the sentence of a former repressor and which was harshly rejected by a large part of society – “the negligence in confirming the sentences of these and other criminals and the slow resolution of the cases that come to the consideration of the Court.” With this, the objective is to demonstrate the non-legitimacy of the actions of the magistrates.
The meetings of the Impeachment Commission will begin the January 26, they will continue on February 2 with the formal argumentation of cases already presented, and will have the maximum peak of institutional tension on February 9.
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