The experts in constitutional law, Cristóbal Rodríguez and Namphi Rodríguez, agree that the “bill on lawsuits for the forfeiture of assets for the civil confiscation of illicit assets” should be declared an organic law.
Lawyer Namphi Rodríguez considered that said initiative should be an organic law because it affects the fundamental right of property, and that it is also stated as a legal institute in article 51 of the Constitution.
In his participation in the Reseñas program, he pointed out that these debates tend to become a bit “Manichean” of groups that support and others that are against.
“In such a serious matter, I think this deserves a point of rationality. In the Dominican Republic, it has traditionally been denounced that there is a large amount of capital of dubious origins in political, business and other activities,” he said.
He explained that the domain right is an attribute of the property right that allows the disposition or usufruct of the right and recalled that the country has also signed some agreements on domain extinction.
Likewise, he stated that the need to institute a procedure that allows the termination of a property right through a civil lawsuit without any compensation in return has been under discussion for some time.
He pointed out that the law also has the purpose of homologating the sentences that are given in the United States and that pronounce confiscations of assets, which implies that they would come to the Dominican Republic to be homologated with a court and those assets are transformed into money and taken to the State. North American.
For his part, the expert in constitutional law, Cristóbal Rodríguez, highlighted that some sectors think that the bill can be approved with a majority regime typical of ordinary laws, which he sees as an error “because it is a law organic”.
In that sense, it states that it must be approved by two thirds of each of the legislative chambers, once the quorum has been verified.
He specified that the project creates a specialized jurisdiction, such as a court based in the capital, with the possibility of creating courts in different parts of the country with powers limited to the territorial scope.
Interviewed by the journalist Federico Méndez, in the program Spheres of Power, he assured that he intends to adopt a law that regulates important issues of due process in terms of making the burden of proof less demanding.
Warns of the danger of autonomy in the law
Cristóbal Rodríguez considered that the idea of autonomy in the terms that is configured in the bill, constitutes one of the greatest dangers of the piece because it allows the authority informally or at the request of any person or company to initiate an investigation with which activates the presumption of illicitness of an asset, within the framework of which precautionary measures can be adopted, such as embargo, retention and immobility of capital.
