After the different crosses between representatives of the political system and the judicial system, Joaquín Gamba, president of the Association of Public Defenders, assured that in Uruguay “there is a justice for the poor and another for the rich” especially from the point of view of “access to justice”.
Interviewed by En Perspectiva, he assured that this is due to a lack of defenders for the number of cases they must address: Gamba explained that public defenders They attend 300 thousand cases a year, but there are 291 officials, what brings them to work more than 8 hours per day in between twelve and 15 cases. As a solution, they said they needed 112 new workers on the payroll, which would cost US$5.5 million per year. “Nothing was given to us” Gamba criticized.
This situation leads to a “difficulty accessing a defender” for many people who cannot access a private attorney. Due to this situation, the Defenders Association analyzes “file a complaint with international organizations for the lack of public defenders”a fact that they denounced “for a long time” without answers, remarked the president of the group.
Gamba clarified that this does not mean that he agrees with the “intent” that he attributed to the lack of response Fernando Pereira, president of the Broad Front, who said on Wednesday that “It does not delve into” the 50 complaints of police abuse that the political force shared this Monday because the victims “are children of poor people”.
However, the defender assured that these complaints “they did not continue to investigate”, and what prosecution “I had not given an answer to what had happened” in these instances.
In addition, he criticized that the Ministry of the Interior He has “absurdly denied” the situations.
Although the lawyer assured that there is a justice for the poor and another for the rich, he assured that conceptually he agrees with the president of the Supreme Court of Justice. Pérez responded this Wednesday to Pereira at a press conference and said that “Justice is the same for all”. In addition, he criticized that the concepts of the president from the front lines create “a cultural barrier” that generates that “people who do not have resources think about not going to Justice”.
For Gamba, Pérez’s statements mean that the magistrates They are impartial in all cases. opinion with which you agree. The point, according to the president of the Public Defenders, is that access to that Justice is uneven according to resources.
