The Chamber of Senators will begin to debate this week the project that reforms the composition of the Council of the Judiciary with a joint meeting of commissions in which the bill sent by the Executive Power at the end of last year will be put on view, then that the Supreme Court of Justice declared the unconstitutionality of the original regulation sanctioned by Congress in 2006.
The Front of All (FdT) promotes the treatment of the initiative that will act on the composition of the body of jurists that has the constitutional duty to control and sanction, if necessary, the activity of the magistrates of the Argentine judicial system.
The meeting will take place this Tuesday, March 22 at 4:00 p.m. in the Illia Hall of the Legislative Palace, where the members of the Constitutional Affairs and Justice and Criminal Affairs commissions will meet.
Both have the presidency in the hands of the FdT (Guillermo Snopek from Jujuy in Affairs and Oscar Parrilli from Neuquén in Justice) and a majority of members of the ruling party.
For this reason, although Wednesday the 23rd was also scheduled as the last day of debates, It is not ruled out that the opinion will be signed on Tuesday.
“We are going to see how the discussion takes place. The meeting is scheduled with all the projects presented. And the possibility of inviting speakers is not ruled out,” Snopek told Télam.
In any case, the legislator added that “There is a rush to sanction the issue, but it is not certain that an opinion will be signed on Tuesday itself.”
The decision of the ruling party is to advance this month with the discussion of the bill that the Executive Branch sent to the Senate in early December 2021, weeks before the Supreme Court declared the bill unconstitutional. current regulations that, in 2006, reduced the number of members of the body from 20 to 13.
In that sense, it is probable that, if it obtains clearance from both commissions, the bill will be debated in the chamber the following week.
In their ruling, the judges also entrusted Congress with the sanction of a new law that regulates it and granted it a period of 120 calendar days to elect new members.
The ruling of December 16 last of the highest court defined that the composition does not respect the “balance” of the sectors that select, sanction and eventually remove magistratesand ordered that the Congress dictate a regulation that regulates it and that the Council reintegrate in 20 if the law is not sanctioned before next April 14, 2022.
Official senators strongly questioned that ruling and Parrilli, for example, said that the decision of the highest court was not “correct” and that the judges “exceeded their powers” because “they should not have declared the unconstitutionality when the law was fully in force “.
Anabel Fernández Sagasti from Mendoza, meanwhile, considered that the decision of the Supreme Court “bordes on the institutional blow”.
The project sent by the Executive Power, and on which the discussion will revolve in the commissions, proposes raising the members of that body from 13 to 17, with the aim of improving and streamlining the selection procedures for magistrates.
The initiative adds two lawyers, a judge and a member of the academic and scientific fieldor to the different levels that the Council has today, and incorporates the gender perspective in order to comply with international conventions and internal regulations.
In this way, the body will be made up of four judges from the Judiciary (until now there were two), and the representation of all its instances and the presence of magistrates with federal jurisdiction from the interior of the country must be guaranteed, of which at least two they must be women.
There will also be six representatives of the Legislative Power, three deputies and three senators (two for the majority block of each chamber, and one for the first minority). Three of these legislators, at least, must be women.
The group of lawyers will have four representatives (until now there were three) elected by direct vote, according to the D’Hont system, from those registered in the Public Bar Association of the Federal Capital or in the federal chambers with seats in the provinces. At least two of them must be women.
The body will also include a representative of the national Executive Power, and two corresponding to the academic and/or scientific spheres (until now there was only one). One of them, at least, will be a woman.
