COLOMBIA: Court Workers’ Strike Continues Despite Ultimatum

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Oct 15 2008 (IPS) - Colombian President Álvaro Uribe has invoked emergency powers to break up a 42-day strike by the country’s court workers, announcing that as of Tuesday, any judge, prosecutor or other judicial employee who does not show up at work may be dismissed.

But “the strike is continuing nationwide,” Fabio Hernández, president of the National Association of Judicial Branch Employees (Asonal Judicial), told IPS.

It was Colombia’s most powerful banker, Luis Carlos Sarmiento, who recommended on Oct. 7 that the government take this drastic measure, citing statistics on the notoriously slow pace of the country’s justice system and the overload of cases.

The strike has brought 80 percent of activities in the judiciary to a halt since Sept. 3, when 32,000 of the system’s 40,000 employees declared a work stoppage.

According to the government, more than 2,700 suspects have been released from prison, nearly 121,000 legal proceedings have come to a halt, and over 25,000 court hearings have been postponed in the last five weeks as a result of the strike.

Uribe has not negotiated with Asonal, but instead unilaterally decreed 56.6 billion dollars in bonuses for judges, prosecutors and court workers over the next few years.

The main demands of the union are guarantees of the independence of the judiciary and the enforcement of a 1992 salary adjustment law that has never been implemented, which would bring judicial branch salaries into line with those of the legislative and executive branches.

Only the highest judicial branch salaries are currently comparable to those of the other two branches.

Full implementation of the law would require 260 million dollars, “but to kickstart the process,” Asonal agreed to 99 million dollars for 2009, said Hernández.

Tarcisio Mora, president of the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), Colombia’s main trade union confederation, to which the Asonal belongs, said it is incredible that “judges, magistrates and court workers…have to rebel against the law just to get the law enforced.”

The CUT called a nationwide general strike for Oct. 23, to protest the president’s decision to invoke emergency powers.

Article 213 of the Colombian constitution states that the president can decree a “state of internal turmoil” or emergency powers “in case of grave disturbances of public order, which imminently undermine institutional stability, state security or peaceful coexistence.”

The emergency powers can remain in place for up to nine months.

The government argued that the strike posed an “evident threat to institutional stability, state security and peaceful coexistence,” “destabilisation” and “imminent” assault on “public order and on normal access to justice by citizens and all sectors of society.”

Another of Asonal’s demands is job stability, since most court workers are hired under fixed-term contracts that may or may not be renewed at any given time. “There are civil servants who have been working for more than 20 years as temporary public employees, even though that is illegal,” according to Mora.

But the first emergency power exercised targets precisely the question of job stability, since as of Tuesday, judges and prosecutors who are on strike can be replaced, although a three day “grace period” was also announced.

Manuela Carmena, chairperson-rapporteur of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the United Nations Human Rights Council, criticised both the strike and Uribe’s approach to it.

“The strike is the illness,” she said Friday, at the end of a 10-day visit to Colombia by the Working Group. “It is unacceptable at an institutional and constitutional level. Those who are responsible for guaranteeing the rights and freedoms of people cannot go on strike. It is the structure that guarantees order, a pillar of order, and it is not possible to pull it out from underneath.”

“Like all illnesses, the important thing is to cure them,” said Carmena, who argued that “the only way to cure this illness” is by providing a solution to its causes.

She also warned that “stripping judges of their judicial authority is no solution.”

“The solution cannot be to say ‘if in my view the judges don’t work, I’ll name others,’ no. Members of the judiciary aren’t interchangeable. They’re not pencils, that you can just use these ones or those ones,” she added.

“The judiciary is a branch of the state that has, naturally, an institutional responsibility. This work stoppage shows that we have what we could call an institutional illness, and a solution must be found,” said Castrillo. “What is required is an agreement between the two branches that will allow the situation to return to normal.”

In her view, invoking emergency powers to clamp down on the strike “is a kind of therapy that could make the illness even worse.”

Replacing the judges and prosecutors who are on strike “is very disturbing to me, because it implies questioning one of the basic principles of the justice system itself, the immovability of functionaries, which guarantees its independence,” she said, before clarifying that those who fail to fulfil their duties can be removed, but “there is a disciplinary process for that.”

Both the rightwing Uribe administration and the Asonal Judicial say they are open to dilaogue, and held an informal meeting Monday night.

But Hernández told IPS that the union does not accept “the government’s idea that the strike will be lifted by invoking emergency powers.”

The trade union leader, who is a prosecutor in the Bogota High Court, said the government’s decision “is completely unconstitutional, because a peaceful strike like ours does not affect the public order in the least.”

He said the government’s aim is to “use extraordinary powers to clamp down on the strike” and “send a warning” to others.

But it is the reason that Colombia’s wealthiest banker wanted the government to take such a measure that is “the underlying problem,” said Hernández.

In August, the financial sector announced 8.6 billion pesos (just over four million dollars) in earnings. And the 7.5 percent growth posted by the Colombian economy in 2007 did not lead to any improvements in social justice: “it was the banking sector and the mining industry that pocketed that capital,” according to Hernández.

Meanwhile, “more than 60 percent of the cases handled by the civil and municipal courts” are bank foreclosures “to deprive of their homes people who are unable to pay the extremely high mortgage interest rates,” said the trade unionist, explaining why the courts are overwhelmed with cases.

“That is what prompted Mr. Sarmiento to call for emergency powers, and what made the president race to do so,” he said.

The emergency powers are aimed at “two things: suffocating the strike, by means of arbitrary measures, pressure and the replacement of workers,” and helping the financial sector “so that “the foreclosure cases can continue.” “There are billions of pesos at stake,” he told IPS.

Another large part of the legal cases involve requests for court orders to obtain treatment in the health system, he added.

Instead of needing a doctor’s order for treatment and medicine, “patients have to obtain and present court orders to get treatment” by the private companies that replaced the state social security system, “which demonstrates the inexistence of a serious, reliable health system in Colombia,” said Hernández.