Flying Pigs

Following recent events, it now makes sense why the famous threat to sue New York’s Wall Street Journal and Madrid’s El País for alleged libel never materialized. It is because in no federal or state court in the United States or Spain — or, if you will, in Belgium, Germany, Chile or Canada, to name a few examples — would the judicial circus we had here have been possible.

Someone surely must have warned the prosecutor that in those countries, judges take criminal law very seriously; that over there, judicial institutions are independent of political power; that in those hallowed grounds, judges do not permit one party, behind the other’s back, to send an already written sentence to the judge to simply be transcribed and signed by him; that sentences there are of great scientific rigor; that those judges do not award, just like that, without any evidence, millions of dollars for alleged damages and lost profits, even if the plaintiff is a king; that over there, judiciary councils are not vassals of power.

The prosecutor would probably find out what an independent justice system means if ever he has to appear, for any reason, before a foreign or international court. Nowadays, the courts of many countries and the international courts are expanding their jurisdiction to unforeseen limits. There, the prosecutor might have the opportunity to feel what it means to be subject to the rule of law and not to their desires.

He will recall with nostalgia the days when he owned justice in his small country, when he was judge and jury, when he attended his audiences escorted by armed militaries and civil servants, despite saying that he did it as an ordinary citizen. He will remember those judges who denied defendants their requested evidence to leave them defenseless — judges who, in order to please him, supposedly read thousands of pages and wrote hundreds of pages in a few hours, and who meekly accepted any legal charade, arguing even that pigs fly. He will miss serially using great amounts of public money to defend a “private” dispute and being able to freely libel, knowing that he was legally protected.

Obviously, July 7 was a disastrous day for freedom of expression. But it was more so for Ecuadorian law. The sentence has already traveled the world. The question posed over and over again by lawyers, academics and European and other international human rights organizations has always been the same: How could a judge have signed such a thing?

The degradation of the judicial system is not new. The difference is that the old puppeteers moved their institutions with skilled hands that could barely be seen, while today they do so clumsily. The sentence is the best proof. Even with all power at their disposal, they did not make the effort to produce something presentable. Of course, it is also true that you cannot make a duchess out of a fishwife.