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The IACHR establishes that indefinite reelection is not a human right

2021-08-16T19:17:40.527Z


The opinion of the Court, requested as a result of the fourth nomination of Evo Morales, generates controversy in Bolivia


The president of MAS, former president Evo Morales, this month in La Paz.Martin Alipaz / EFE

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) has established that "the prohibition of indefinite reelection is compatible with the American Convention on Human Rights."

This “advisory opinion” of the Court has been received with great interest and controversy in Bolivia, which continues to be affected by the serious political crisis caused by the rejection of certain sectors of the population to the fourth presidential nomination of Evo Morales in 2019.

In order to get Morales to qualify then, despite the fact that the Constitution prohibited it, his party, the Movement for Socialism (MAS), obtained a ruling from the Constitutional Court according to which re-elections could take place indefinitely because this was a “human right”. For this, the Bolivian Constitutional Court relied on its own interpretation of the American Convention or the Pact of San José. Now this interpretation has been refuted by the Inter-American Court, which is in charge of settling disputes on the Convention.

"Indefinite presidential reelection does not constitute an autonomous right protected by the American Convention or by the

corpus iuris

of international human rights law," says Advisory Opinion 28/21.

This was requested by the president of Colombia, Iván Duque, in October 2019, mainly because of what was happening then in Bolivia.

However, Nicaragua and Honduras also relied on the Pact of San José to extend the reelection of their leaders.

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The ruling is justified by the democratic need to prevent majorities from remaining in power at the expense of minorities.

"Enabling indefinite presidential re-election is contrary to the principles of a representative democracy," he indicates.

And he considers that this prohibition "seeks to prevent people who hold positions by popular election from perpetuating themselves.

in the exercise of power ”.

The decision of the Inter-American Court has been the target of praise and attacks from three fronts of the Bolivian political debate.

Evo Morales declared that it was "a generic opinion (...) nowhere in the document is Evo or Bolivia mentioned."

In addition, he tweeted that "the advisory opinion promoted by Duque, the human rights violator in Colombia, is an attack by the coup leader [Luis] Almagro and his right-wing accomplices to politically destabilize democracy."

"Since they could never beat us at the polls, they use the Inter-American Court to justify their defeats," he added.

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Morales' anger against the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, is due to the fact that this organization audited the October 2019 elections (in which Evo Morales was reelected for the fourth time) and determined the existence of serious irregularities.

The OAS report led to the annulment of those elections and the calling of new ones, in which Morales could no longer run.

That is why the Minister of Justice, Iván Lima, also a MAS militant, has indicated that today Bolivia has no problems with the determination of the Inter-American Court, since the indefinite re-election was annulled by the country after what happened in 2019. The definitions of the Inter-American Court are binding on all nations that signed the Pact of San José.

EL MAS believes that the social upheaval generated by the complaint of electoral fraud and the OAS audit was part of a coup that ultimately overthrew President Morales with the participation of the Armed Forces and the Police. The opposition defends the thesis that it was a spontaneous movement that faced a “monumental fraud”.

Although Evo Morales has assured that at this moment he is not thinking about the 2025 elections, he is considered the most likely candidate of the MAS when the term of the current president, Luis Arce, ends. The opposition front has tried to use the ruling of the Court to prevent this possibility. One of the most important leaders of this current, Carlos Mesa, celebrated the "historic reparation of democracy in Bolivia with the binding ruling" of the Court and proposed a trial against the magistrates of the Constitutional Court who interpreted the Convention in favor of Morales and against the former president himself for "breach of duties and undermining popular sovereignty."

Some of the main Bolivian newspapers accused Morales of having spent hundreds of millions of Bolivians in electoral and judicial maneuvers aimed at obtaining his reelection.

The daily

El Deber

, the most important in Santa Cruz, joined Mesa's position and called for a trial against the promoters of the empowerment of the MAS leader.

He also questioned the suitability of the two judges of the Inter-American Court who voted against Advisory Opinion 28/21, the Argentine Raúl Zaffaroni and the Ecuadorian Patricio Pazmiño.

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Source: elparis

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