Daniel Santoro
08/15/2021 4:49 PM
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 08/15/2021 4:49 PM
Constitutionalist Daniel Sabsay listed
half a dozen grounds to justify the request for impeachment of President Alberto Fernández, including lying to society
for holding parties at Quinta de Olivos during the quarantine.
He recalled that the political trials of former US presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were based on
their public lies.
In addition, the professor of Constitutional Law at the Law School of the UBA and a famous polemicist on social networks, denounced
"an impunity plan"
by Vice President Cristina Kirchner and harshly criticized the
"fearful and time-consuming judges
" who annul processes or delay lawsuits.
The following is the synthesis of an interview with
Clarín
:
- Faced with the scandal of the parties in Olivos, the opposition called for the impeachment of President Alberto Fernández, are there legal grounds for such a serious measure?
- There are different grounds for removal, but the most used is due to poor performance of functions. Defining what is bad performance is something complex, but I always resort to the notion of German Bidart Campos that said that bad performance is the opposite of good performance. And what is good performance? It is what a society expects at a certain time and place and that it is worthy of its investiture. It is not the photo of Olivos itself, the first major breach of the President is the breach of the principle of equality. In addition, the breach of the regulations that he created through the emergency decrees on the restrictions due to COVID. Violated the principle of equality,In other words, he and his group consider themselves to be above the law and the Constitution in the sense that they would not be obliged to comply with the obligations that all citizens have. Let us not forget that the President of his oath swears to comply with and enforce the Constitution. It is the main commitment that he made and broke.
The photo of Fabiola Yáñez's birthday in Olivos in the middle of the strict quarantine.
This, regardless of whether he is investigated in the Justice for crimes in the performance of his functions, which is already another criminal issue that is not my specialty. These are crimes against health. In addition, as a cause of impeachment is the lie. While the birthday was unfolding, a cable from an official news agency commented for the first time that the first lady was going to celebrate her birthday in virtual form. And then the President denied that there had been any parties. All the important political trials in history of presidents, for example of the United States. The first case was against Richard Nixon for Watergate that was not consummated because he resigned earlier. But the cause that was most considered in Congress was not the fact that they had wiretapped the headquarters of the Democratic Party,rather, he said it was not true. Then something similar happened to Bill Clinton with the Monica Lewinski case. In this case, it was not so much the fact that it had to do with his private life, but rather that he had denied it. In Israel and Norway presidents were also played for lying.
- From a political point of view, if the president is eventually removed, Vice President Cristina Kirchner would take over.
- If Cristina were to assume the presidency, things would not change much because the vice president has actually been in power for a long time, even shortly after the new administration took office in December 2019. I was encouraged to speak of vice-presidentialism in fact.
There has been a kind of constitutional mutation, despite the Constitution establishing that the president occupy the executive power.
Vice-presidentialism is a very large unconstitutionality because it was not the product of a constitutional reform, but of the facts.
-
Argentina exceeded more than 100,000 deaths from Covid. Was the VIP vaccination a crime and the Government for the delay in obtaining vaccines can have a criminal responsibility for deaths in a pandemic?
- The mission of the President is to do what corresponds, also based on the circumstances. Not only him but all the officials who acted in the negotiation with Pfizer and Russia, such as (Carla) Vizzotti and (Cecilia) Nicolini must be investigated. His statements and that of the vice president showed that they preferred vaccines from China and Russia for an ideological issue. There was even talk that Pfizer wanted to take natural resources such as glaciers. So, the absolute lack of commitment to the people to exclusively privilege a tactical alliance of an ideological type, it seems to me that it denotes an immense criminal responsibility by omission and even by action because it should be it took a long time. Curiously, that "so atrocious empire" (United States) that wanted to take over our natural reserves,He has given us millions of vaccines. Applying vaccines on time would have saved lives. It is a mathematical issue, it is not a political position. Specialist calculations estimated that at least 10,000 people could have been saved if the vaccines had arrived in March.
- But Judge María Eugenia Capuchetti ruled that in the VIP Vaccination case that those who received the vaccine in a privileged way, such as Valdés and Verbitsky, did not commit a crime but a moral fault.
- First, in most cases the privileged had to fill out an affidavit stating that they were health or strategic personnel.
So they incurred the crime of perjury or malicious omission.
The judge showed very little commitment in her profession.
She is obviously a cautious judge in quotes.
He also did it in a very strange way, because some of the case of Gines Gonzalez García did not raise the charge, Vizzotti did and the nephew did not.
It is such an absolutely arbitrary sentence.
- After the annulment of the trial of the Future Dollar case, will the vice president be able to close the seven prosecutions that still remain?
- In your Final Battle, as you say, I hope you do not achieve impunity. It all depends on whether or not the ruling party gets its own quorum in the Chamber of Deputies in the November elections. Many of the vice president's most reckless legislative experiments are still there. The impunity plan has managed to at least stop several trials such as Cuadernos, Vialidad and Hotesur and Los Sauces. Even those federal courts are not given sufficient means to start the trials from the Supreme Court. It is worrying. And in the case of the Future Dollar and the Pact with Iran, something has happened that is unprecedented. These federal courts have legislated on procedural matters by creating a “preliminary hearing” for the oral trial, a new instance that violates the principle of legality.There are judges who have legislated and taken over functions of Congress. The code of procedures is a faculty of Congress as well as the organization of justice. The federal oral court 8 made up of (José) Michilini, (Gabriela) López Iñiguez and (Daniel) Obligado did not act in accordance with the law.
I do not want to involve the judges of all jurisdictions because they would be very unfair.
But these are easy-going judges, timers, and they're scared.
Imagine, in which country an accused vice president allows herself to insult as another federal court did on another occasion.
Even threatening the judges in a totally rude way for more than an hour and turn on an audience that was allowed to enter to launch a political harangue and nothing happens, that is a cause for judgment.
The worst thing is the judges who are awarded are those who collaborate with the power.
- Elisa Carrió affirmed that Cristina Kirchner will be sentenced in two or three years and that she will suffer house arrest, do you share this estimate?
- It all depends on what will happen in the elections.
These same judges, if they see that the political time of this government is over, they will turn around.
They are calculating judges because they think exclusively about their future.
The fundamental attribute that a judge must have is the courage to enforce the law.
- Mendoza's electoral judge Walter Bento is on trial and continues to organize the elections. Should he request a license until his procedural situation is resolved?
- The accusations against Bento are exceptionally serious.
You should already be charged and suspended.
The fact that from the Council the Magistracy has not even accused him speaks clearly of the enormous complicity that exists.
On the other hand, the electoral judge of the Capital managed to appoint her son to the Magistracy and the ruling party pushed Alejo Ramos Padilla, who you know him well, to the electoral court of the province.
They are unreliable and control the elections in three major constituencies.
- The Council of the Magistracy promoted the contests of the chambermaids Pablo Bertuzzi and Leopoldo Bruglia but not of 37 other judges who were also transferred, as the Court said. Does the Magistracy fail?
- The Council of the Magistracy is a very unhappy incorporation into the Constitution from a model of European parliamentarism. Europe has a history of monarchies. Instead, our constitution took the presidential model of the United States. It is a wedge and, if the term will allow me, against nature. But the worst thing was, everything was the way it was legislated. It is the only Council of the Magistracy that has members who are politicians. This does not exist anywhere. In addition, what is the meaning of putting politicians, in short what the appointment of magistrates does, what the concept of the Magistracy does is an action prior to the intervention of the two political bodies (the government and Congress) that are the ones that finally, names, that is, they select three judges who are going to make up the shortlist based on position and competition.the Executive Power is going to appoint one and the Senate is going to lend in accordance with which, the crucial participation continues to be the political organs of the sense of putting in also political representatives.
But worst of all is that these political representatives, despite the fact that article 114 of the Constitution says that there has to be a balance between political representatives and justice. The problem was aggravated by the law that Mrs. Kirchner planned when she was president of the Senate's Constitutional Affairs commission in 2006. The number of members was reduced to 13, but the five representatives of the ruling party and two legislators from the opposition. In short, more than 52% are politicians. This law was declared unconstitutional five years ago by an excellent ruling from the Federal Administrative Chamber and it has been more than five years that an appeal from the Cristina government has been sleeping in the Supreme Court, which is already surprising.I think that it would be very serious to say if the Supreme Court had confirmed this unconstitutionality, this story would be another, it would be the previous law also exaggerated.
- In the face of Cristina Kirchner, who understands justice as a power game, what can civil society do?
- Very much and in fact I am tired of saying that as never before, the banderazos have partly stopped that plan of impunity or participating in entities such as REJIA.
All the tools of democracy must be used to prevent impunity and to embrace the Republic.