Francisco Barbosa has already left his office in the famous bunker of the Colombian Attorney General's Office, but he still does not have a successor.
At least, not in property.
For almost two weeks now, the interim prosecutor has been Martha Mancera, Barbosa's highly questioned number two.
With tempers heated after the demonstrations that blocked the entrances to the Supreme Court of Justice at the beginning of the month, the 23 judges meet again this Thursday for a third day of voting that will allow them to choose between the three renowned criminal lawyers nominated months ago. by President Gustavo Petro, amid growing calls, from different shores, for there to be white smoke once and for all.
Although the Court does not have established deadlines to decide on one of the candidates, choosing between Ángela María Buitrago, Amelia Pérez and Luz Adriana Camargo would help calm things down.
Hence the requests for speed.
President Petro, constantly confronted with the now former prosecutor Barbosa, has placed great emphasis on the fact that he wanted to present a shortlist of prosecutors that he did not know personally and who had not had any political activity alongside him, in “a different message from the past.” ”.
Barbosa, without going too far, is a close friend of Iván Duque and was an official in his government before he fired him.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) made one of the first calls to select the attorney general “as soon as possible” to avoid “weakening the justice system.”
The United Nations Human Rights Office in Colombia soon joined in, urging the Court to “conclude the prosecutor selection process in the shortest possible time,” and also asked the Government to “provide guarantees” so that the high court can conclude the selection “without interference of any kind.”
Over the last week, new calls have been accumulating for the election to take place and avoid further heating up tempers.
One of the main arguments is due to the selection background.
The constitutionalist Rodrigo Uprimny took the trouble to review the time taken by the high court, once the presidential shortlist was received, to elect the nine prosecutors that Colombia has had.
“The Court, on average, elected the first five prosecutors in 19 days, and always before the end of the period, avoiding the interim in the first 17 years of the Prosecutor's Office,” he wrote in his column in El
Espectador
.
That was before the 2009-2010 crisis, when the Court confronted then-president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, whose government had spied on the magistrates.
That episode marked a before and after.
The Court did not select a prosecutor from the shortlist presented by Uribe, the interim period lasted for 16 months and was only resolved when Juan Manuel Santos presented a new shortlist.
In summary, Uprimny maintains, “until 2009, there was a fast Court: it decided in 19 days, without interim periods.
Then came the serious crisis of 2009-2010, which caused a long interim period.
Subsequently, we entered a slower Court whose average increased to 45 days and with interim periods.”
The Court, according to its accounts, has now gone almost 150 days without selecting a prosecutor, almost eight times the average time of the “fast Court” and more than three times that of the “slow Court.”
With this argument, Uprimny leaves a couple of questions on the table: “Why is this extreme slowness in choosing the new prosecutor from this shortlist made up of three women who have not been questioned ethically, who are not close to the president and who have Extensive experience in criminal investigation and good knowledge of the Prosecutor's Office?
And why postpone the election of the prosecutor if it is clear that with it many of the current institutional tensions would be alleviated?
The positions are not unanimous.
The newspaper
El Tiempo
, for example,
has defended in its editorial that the mandate conferred on the Court “does not impose different times than those taken by the high court to reach qualified majorities.”
That is, the vote of at least 16 of the 23 judges.
But another renowned jurist, the lawyer and professor Ramiro Bejarano, maintains another interpretation.
“If the Constitution says that the prosecutor's term lasts four years and the Court sends the shortlist four months in advance of that date, by a logical application of the rules of rights, the useful effect of the rules, what should be done the Court is that at the end of the period it has already designated the person who is going to succeed him,” he noted in a recent interview with this newspaper.
In other words, the Court should avoid interim proceedings.
Other layers of discussion have been superimposed on the purely legal debate.
Being a woman is a disadvantage when it comes to being elected to judicial positions, as the selection process has illustrated, recalled the writer Yolanda Reyes.
“'The courts are sexist,' many lawyers repeat and, although there are other issues at stake in the election of the prosecutor, related to polarization and crucial decisions in political matters, this supposed subtlety to sabotage the shortlist, voting blank and making mathematical maneuvers to not achieve the required majority and delay decisions, is already identified and is sadly known in any book that addresses gender issues,” wrote the columnist.
Of the 23 magistrates of the Plenary Chamber of the Court, the one that elects a prosecutor, only 6 are women.
Among the discussions about this postponement, suspicions about the bureaucratic appetite of the magistrates themselves have also arisen.
“The truth, although it hurts, is that a while ago the Supreme Court of Justice changed its moral criteria for choosing attorney general,” wrote journalist María Jimena Duzán.
“In the back room, where power is compromised, what the magistrates appreciate most when choosing a prosecutor is the ability of the candidates to give them positions in the Prosecutor's Office,” she maintains.
“The only reason why the Supreme Court of Justice has not chosen the new prosecutor is because they have not yet been able to square with any of the shortlists what slice of cake they get,” she concludes.
The court itself has this Thursday a new opportunity to settle all those discussions and turn the page.
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