Complaints, recriminations over IAHRC hearing on Panamanian justice

The Martinelli administration before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission

How to lose friends and offend people
by Eric Jackson

The law provides for an independent judiciary; however, the judicial system was susceptible to corruption and outside influence, including manipulation by other branches of government.

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In 2008 the National Assembly approved a new Code of Criminal Procedures (new code), through which the country will transition from an inquisitorial to an accusatory system of justice. The new code incorporates anticorruption elements, such as regulations to penalize conflicts of interest, protect witnesses and whistleblowers, and allow the use of plea bargaining. In August, a month before the new code was to have entered into force, the government postponed its implementation….

US State Department
Report on Human Rights in Panama
March 11, 2010

What the US State Department said about Panamanian justice in its most recent human rights report was hardly new. Actually, it has said the same thing in starker terms many times before. Moreover, the recent report covered only things that happened in 2009, so didn't get into the maneuvers by which President Martinelli revived a section of the constitution that was repealed, allied himself with the sleaziest of extortionist punks, and ousted Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez in favor of an undistinguished lawyer who will do his bidding.

Ah, but as part of a regular review process the Inter-American Human Rights Commission was due to take up the subject of Panama's justice system, and a hearing was scheduled for March 23.

Now it shouldn't have been a problem, but Mr. Martinelli apparently thought that it was. See, all the commissioners are lawyers, most of them have been judges, and they all know how to read Spanish legalese. They knew of the pseudo-constitutional chicanery used to remove Gómez, and they wanted to hear from her.

But Gómez is facing two years in prison for acceding to the request of crime victims, listening in on the victims phones as they demanded, and catching one of her subordinates, prosecutor Arquímedes Sáez, shaking people down for a bribe. She caught him in a sting, arrested him and fired him. But later the high court found that it was an illegal wiretap, Sáez brought charges of criminal abuse of power and Martinelli supports Sáez. The Supreme Court ruled that Gómez must step down pending trial and may not leave the country without its permission.

So Gómez asked for permission to go to Washington to testify, and the Martinelli faction on the high court, plus one of the PRD appointees, turned her down. It was a typical information control game by the guy who, while Minister of Canal Affairs, replaced the US Freedom of Information Act with an "if you talk to a reporter you're fired" policy at the Panama Canal. Gómez wouldn't be able to go to Washington and say bad things about the president.

Did he think that not allowing Gómez to appear would help his case? Could be. Maybe that's the kind of down-home backwoods legal coverage he learned in his Wal-Mart administrative internship in Arkansas. After all, it's a state where it used to be a matter of law, and afterwards was a de facto rule, that a black person's testimony could not count against a white person in a court of law. Pretty neat trick --- except that the commissioners took Gómez's exclusion as a pretty strong statement that Martinelli was trying to hide something.

The civil society delegation included Katya Salazar of the Due Process of Law Foundation, law professor and human rights activist Miguel Antonio Bernal and Magaly Castillo of the Citizens Alliance for Justice, a 19-group coalition whose members range from the legal, professional and religious establishment to moderate leftist reformers.

Salazar testified that the 2002 scandal about the bribery of the legislature to gain the approval of magistrates Winston Spadafora and Alberto Cigarruista (now part of the Martinelli faction on the court) has never been investigated, and that under the weight of that and subsequent scandals "Panamanian justice has collapsed." She said that she didn't come to argue the Gómez case, but pointed to the way that the high court took just five hours to refuse to hear the Attorney General's legal defense as one of the "very strong indications of undue interference" by politicians in the judicial process.

Salazar also noted that in the Americas only Panama and Haiti have trials that consist of reading aloud documents from a dossier rather than taking live testimony from witnesses, a practice that she said slows down and bureaucratizes the entire legal system. When combined with the procedure of prosecutors ordering preventive detention, she said, the grinding bureaucracy means that not only are some 60 percent of all of Panama's prisoners awaiting trial rather than having been convicted, a majority of those held in preventive detention have never seen a judge's face with respect to his or her case.

Castillo said that in the 20 minutes allotted to herself, Salazar and Bernal, there were too many faults of Panamanian justice to discuss, but that "judicial independence is what brought us here." Bernal added that "you can't have judicial independence where you have corruption."

Bernal, Castillo and Salazar asked the commission to come to Panama and conduct an on-site inspection of the judicial system.

Defending the Martinelli administration was Panama's ambassador to the OAS, attorney, former mayor of Panama City and leader of the Christian Democrats / Partido Popular until jumping ship to Martinelli's Cambio Democratico in 2008, Guillermo Cochez. Either because his aptitude is political intrigue rather than legal defense or because he had a poor case to defend, Cochez all but capitulated on the facts. He argued that the situations that Salazar, Castillo and Bernal pointed out were old news --- Gómez's removal being less than two months old --- and that the administration of justice "is one of the subjects that most concerns the present administration."

The commission has yet to make its report, but at the hearing commissioners María Silvia Guillén (El Salvador), Jesús Orozco Henríquez (Mexico) and Felipe González (Chile) expressed their concern about the situation in Panama. What goes on here was clearly untenable if the rule of law means anything. Cochez's lack of substantive answers to the specific points raised and Gómez's telling absence made the hearing a rout.

This did not play well back in Panama. Minister of the Presidency Demetrio Papadimitriu implicitly questioned Salazar's, Castillo's and Bernal's patriotism by complaining that they "hurt the country's image" by "washing dirty laundry abroad." Martinelli also went on the attack, dismissing the civil society delegation as "three people organizing a riot."

The ever-obedient acting attorney general Giuseppe Bonissi chimed in with leaks about how Castillo had a conflict of interest, as a Bolivian consulting firm for which she works part time, Aguilar y Asociados, had a $251,181 contract with the Inter-American Development Bank to assist the Public Ministry adapt to the adversarial system of criminal procedure which the Torrijos administration adopted but Martinelli postponed until after he leaves office. Bonissi spun it as a crooked deal between Gómez and Castillo and canceled the contract.