Two months have passed since a group of senators from Chile Vamos and the Democratic party in formation presented seven requests before the Constitutional Court (TC) in order to challenge the pardons granted by President Gabriel Boric to six convicted of crimes committed in the framework of the social outbreak and the ex-frontist Jorge Mateluna, the organ failed to rule on the matter.
At about 9:30 a.m., the court began the arguments between the parties involved, the Government and senators. From the Executive, the person in charge of defending the constitutionality of the presidential benefit was the adviser and lawyer of the State Defense Council (CDE), Raúl Letelier.
For its part, from the opposition -Chile Vamos y Demócratas- the person selected to challenge the pardons granted by the head of state was the UDI lawyer and ex-conventionalist, Constanza Hube, who began the allegations pointing to the reason for the pardons.
“One thing has to do with using a certain power, but a very different thing is abusing that power. These requirements are interposed because in Chile no person can attribute other authority or rights than those expressly established in the Constitution or the Law “, he declared.
Along the same lines, Hube pointed out that “without prejudice to the fact that the President’s decision to pardon the convicted is endowed with a certain freedom in the exercise of his discretionary power, this does not enable him to do so out of mere liberality, it does not enable him without establish a logical process that explains why it led to and led to such a decision.
Meanwhile, on the part of the Government, the CDE counselor argued that “pardons are sometimes used as an expression of political forgiveness and this is perhaps the most usual historical use of pardons, after political crises and those involved in it are pardoned as a way of overcoming and as a way of social recomposition. This predilection of the contrary for humanitarian reasons is simply a political conditioning”.
Regarding pardons, Letelier explained that these belong to the political prerogatives of President Boric, and that is why “he only pardons or commutes the sentence, it does not refer to the legal imputation of the crime, criminal law is still in force, which there is something different, it is the inclusion of an element strange in some way to the normative world such as forgiveness”.
After hearing the arguments of both parties, the ministers of the Constitutional Court determined that the facts presented in the instance were not sufficient to rule on the merits of the case. In view of the foregoing, they decreed a series of measures “to better resolve” the requirement presented by the opposition parliamentarians.
The rapporteur of the TC, José Francisco Leyton, explained that “it was resolved to decree measures to better resolve prior to the adoption of the agreement in relation to the seven requirements of unconstitutionality deduced by a group of honorable senators, in relation to the supreme decrees that They granted private pardons. These measures will be reported during the course of the afternoon.
It should be remembered that the contested pardons are those of the former frontista Jorge Mateluna, Luis Castillo, Jordano Santander, Bastián Campos, Claudio Romero, Felipe Santana and Brandon Rojas. The same action was not filed in the remaining cases, since they were not cases that required well-founded decrees, which are the ones that are being objected to before the TC.
