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Campaigning to eradicate court delay: power shifts and new governance in criminal justice in Argentina

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Abstract

Since the transition to democracy court delay has been a powerful signifier of the problem of the criminal justice in Argentina. This has been the case particularly in the Province of Buenos Aires where court delay was constantly projected by the Provincial Government’s narrative as evidence of injustice and/or inefficiency in the system. It has been the focus of sustained political attacks upon judges, defence lawyers and public prosecutors by members of the national and provincial parliaments of Argentina. These narratives of court delay have enabled a number of reforms of the criminal justice system which have reshaped organisational practices to the extent of constituting a new and different strategy of producing justice. This article identifies, describes and makes sense of those discourses and practices, and the strategies and tactics behind them by analysing the governmental narrative and the judicial and organisational reforms.

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Notes

  1. In Latin America criminal justice has been the object of comprehensive reforms in the process of transition to the rule of law in the last decades. Court delay has not been an exclusive problem of Argentina; on the contrary court delay has been a widespread problem in criminal justice all over Latin America for decades and reforms have been carried out in the criminal justice of other Latin American countries expressly aiming at reducing it. [1, 2 pp. 19–43]

  2. CEJA is the acronym in Spanish for Justice Studies Centre of the Americas, an agency of the Inter-American system which promotes criminal justice reforms all over Latin America.

  3. Langer explains that in Latin America reformers and politicians have described ‘a move towards accusatorial systems’ in: the introduction of oral public trials; the introduction and/or strengthening of the office of the public prosecutor and the decision to put the public prosecutor instead of the Judge in charge of the pre-trial investigation; giving defendants more rights at the pre-trial phase; introducing the principle of prosecutorial discretion; allowing for plea bargaining and other alternative dispute resolution mechanisms; and expanding the victim’s role and protection during the criminal process [11 p. 618].

  4. In fact, the Government stated in the preliminary recitals of the law that introduced the ‘suspensión del juicio a prueba’ that it was based on the diversion rather than the probation. The difference between the probation and the diversion is that while in the probation the sentence is suspended in diversion the criminal process itself is suspended before reaching trial [15 p. 1289]. However, in Argentina the ‘suspensión del juicio a prueba’ has been known as probation.

  5. The law n. 24,390 is popularly known as the ‘2 × 1’ law because of the way it counts double pre-trial prison days.

  6. The situation of Buenos Aires’ prisons, i.e. overpopulation with a majority of detainees waiting for their trial, could be found at that given time in most Latin American’s prisons [17].

  7. In 1984 the newly elected president Alfonsín ordered a commission to design a new CPC. The bill was presented at the National Congress in 1987. However, the bill was not passed that year and finally lost its chance with the drain of power of Alfonsín’s Government. In 1990, under the presidency of Menem, a new proposed law to reform the CPC was presented at the Congress called Levene Code. The bill was in fact one which had been presented in 1975 by the Peronist Party which had not been passed because of the problematic political situation. Maier’s reform of the CPC of 1986 meant a more revolutionary change to an accusatorial based Criminal process than Levene’s reform of CPC which was finally passed [11 p. 641].

  8. The reform of 1987 restricted public oral trials to a small number of offenses, the most serious ones. Even in those cases it was the right of the defendant to decide whether to have an oral trial or not.

  9. Salas Beteta describes the process of criminal procedure reforms in Peru [37].

  10. Article 7.5 of the ACHR says,

    ‘Any person detained shall be brought promptly before a judge or other officer authorized by law to exercise judicial power and shall be entitled to trial within a reasonable time or to be released without prejudice to the continuation of the proceedings’.

  11. The defendant in a criminal process is legally considered to be innocent until a final sentence declares him guilty. However, a sentence is not considered final until every possibility of appeal has been exhausted.

  12. See for e.g. [44–46]

  13. See art. 176 Constitution of PBA.

  14. The comparison between the criminal procedure reform of the Province of Buenos Aires and the one carried out in Chile makes it possible to identify the singularities of each case. In both cases there was resistance to criminal procedure reforms from the part of the judiciary. However, the difference was precisely the political response to such resistance. In the Chilean case, the judiciary tried to thwart the reform through a legal interpretation of the Supreme Court that deactivated the process of replacing written procedures with oral hearing. The Government acted fast and strong mobilizing the whole political forces, and enacted a new law forcing an interpretation of the regulation that backed the process of reforms [61]. The Provincial Government of Buenos Aires never had such political will or force to impose the procedure reform, as a consequence, the judiciary resistance shaped the reforms.

  15. Executive decree n. 1111

  16. Laws n. 13,183 and 13,260

  17. Decisions n. 369/08 and 279/09

  18. Law n. 13,943

  19. Decisions n. 472/04 and 529/06

  20. The same expansion of the state’s judicial system with the declared aim to democratise it can be found in Zunino’s description of Guatemala transition [73].

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Acknowledgments

This paper was written thanks to a generous grant from the University of the Basque Country –EHU that covered my research stay at Liverpool University and a grant from the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law that financed my time at the Institute in Freiburg. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Dave Whyte for his invaluable comments and discussions at various stages of this article’s development. I am much obliged for the comments of the anonymous reviewers. I will also like to thank Michael Mair, Stefanie Khoury and Matías Cordero Arce for their comments on the early drafts of this article.

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  1. University of the Basque Country/EHU, Calle 28 Nº564 e/43 y 44, 1900, La Plata, Argentina

    Pablo Ciocchini

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Ciocchini, P. Campaigning to eradicate court delay: power shifts and new governance in criminal justice in Argentina. Crime Law Soc Change 61, 61–79 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-013-9475-5

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