:quality(85)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/infobae/ENMAROZTNRTWZF4TEPC67CIGVI.jpg "El Salvador Constitutional Crisis: President Bukele’s Power Grab Raises Concerns")
2024-05-01 00:03:00
Human rights defender and former Salvadoran vice presidential candidate Celia Medrano warned that the reform approved by the Legislative Assembly of The Savior to expedite changes to the Constitution “opens the doors” so that the ruling party can “perpetuate in power.”
The Legislative Assembly approved on Monday an amendment to the Constitution that would allow expeditious reforms to the Magna Carta in the legislature that will take office this Wednesday, May 1, and that maintains the large majority of the president’s Nuevas Ideas (NI) party. Nayib Bukele.
“By normalizing the violation of the Salvadoran Constitution, the message that is clear is that all counterweight to the current power is eliminated, which opens the doors to perpetuate itself”considered Medrano, who belonged to the minority Nuestro Tiempo party (NI, center-right), in a written statement shared to EFE.
He pointed out that with this amendment, which must be ratified by the next legislature, “the ruling party majority in the Government unconstitutionally breaks a lock that the Constitution itself establishes precisely to protect its regulations.”
“The law is clear in prohibiting a constitutional reform from being carried out by an outgoing legislature and article 248 integrates a set of articles known as ‘stone’, that is, that They should not be modified because doing so violates the essence of the constitutional norm.“said the human rights defender.
At least two rulings from the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ) establish that a constitutional reform can only be approved before a legislative election, to give the population the opportunity to vote to support it or not.
“It has been a constant of the current legislature and the Government to violate the constitutional norm alleging that by having a legislative majority they have the power to do so, because the people with their votes have empowered them to do so. However, no State body is empowered to violate the law that represents a counterweight to power,” he added.
The original wording of the second paragraph of article 248 established that the only way to modify the Constitution was through approval in a legislature with a simple majority and its ratification with the vote of two-thirds of the legislators.
The approved amendment adds that this process can be carried out in the same legislature with three-quarters of the elected deputies, which can open the door to expedited reforms as of May 1.
The president of the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador, Ernesto Castro, whose functions conclude this Tuesday, defended the reform of an article of the Constitution to expedite changes in it and assured that The ruling party is called to “refound” the country.
“We come here to change things, to re-found this country, and that is what is needed and that is what we are going to do,” Castro, a former government official and member of the NI party, said this Tuesday in an interview on a local television channel.
He defended the approved reform and assured that “Everything the Legislative Assembly does is constitutional.”
“What we did was comply with what the Constitution says to be able to reform an article (…) the Constitution has been respected and continues to be respected to this day,” he said.
He pointed out that following the amendment, which must be ratified by the new legislature that takes office tomorrow, Wednesday, May 1, for a period of three years (2024-2027)“let’s see which articles of the Constitution need reform.”
The non-governmental organization Citizen Action He noted on Monday that the reform of Article 248 of the Constitution eliminates “another political counterweight” in El Salvador.
Meanwhile, the leftist opposition party Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) rejected it and classified it as “a new blow to the Constitution”, “illegal, and with which “continues to dismantle the rule of law, the checks and balances, to institutionalize an authoritarian regime.”
The approval of this controversial reform, which was neither studied nor analyzed in a congressional commission, joins other approvals that have been strongly criticized by various sectors, such as the dismissal of magistrates from the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice on 1 May 2021.
The amendment, which has received criticism from various Salvadoran sectors, adds to article 248 that the same legislature can approve changes to the Magna Carta and ratify them without waiting for the next one, as is currently established.
(With information from EFE)
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