The criminal lawyer Fernando Silva warned that the criminal complaint filed by the coup leader Pedro Castillo against the hundred parliamentarians who approved his vacancy of the Presidency of the Republic should be immediately filed by the Public Ministry because the issue has already been settled by the Constitutional Court (TC).
In statements to Peru21Silva maintained that there is no criminal issue in the complaint since the TC already resolved, at the time, that Parliament did not commit any irregularity in vacating Castillo as indicated in the complaint.
Indeed, the criminal complaint, filed by the former president’s defense, indicates that one hundred legislators from different benches would have incurred the crime of abuse of authority by “illegally” vacating Castillo.
“I believe that there is no criminal issue here for a very simple reason. The first is that this same issue, exactly the same, was already discussed by the Constitutional Court in the habeas corpus that Pedro Castillo presented when he was arrested, and it resolved indicating that there was no irregularity in the actions of Congress, neither at the time of vacating it nor at the time of not filing the political pretrial, including in the fact of not calling him to defend himself,” he said.
“There is an authority like the Constitutional Court that indicated that there is no unusual event. In fact, it was pointed out that rigorous compliance with the requirements established in the Congressional Regulations is not required given that the circumstance that occurred at that time was already an irregular circumstance,” he added.
File complaint
Along these lines, Silva stated that the issue is settled. “What the Prosecutor’s Office can do, I think it would be the correct thing, is to receive the complaint and issue a preliminary file order, that is, order the immediate file because there is already a body like the Constitutional Court – which is the body specialized in interpreting or analyzing actions such as those of Congress, which are constitutional and political actions – which has resolved by pointing out that there is no irregularity,” he pointed out.
Silva added that starting an investigation against a hundred congressmen “would generate an absurd waste of time for the State and a loss of resources,” especially based on the experiences of the Lava Jato case and other special teams in which “we have a lot of experience that are not going to come to anything.” “If this is so, finally the prosecutor must reject it. I would believe that that is what is going to happen,” he said.
At another time, the jurist observed that Pedro Castillo’s defense lacks legal sense and rather “has a political sense of victimizing himself as if he were a politically persecuted person when in reality he is not.”
“It would not surprise me because the lawyers already have the precedent of the Constitutional Court; by filing a new complaint under the same assumption, the only thing they are generating is obtaining more resolutions so that they can say: ‘the complaints are not accepted, he is politically persecuted, he is discriminated against’; these are things that are even said abroad,” he pointed out.
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