We invite you to read the column written by our partner, Gabriel Zaliasnik, on the question “quid ius”, product of the crisis of the Rule of Law in Chile.
In recent years, Chile has accumulated institutional problems that are increasingly deeper and more difficult to address. I have previously stated that in many dimensions we have a failed and anomic State, a State that lacks a solid backbone in its fundamental institutions, that every day loses more and more control of its territory, and in which legal norms are not respected. The crisis in citizen security is just one manifestation of the above.
Stalin is credited with the phrase “one dead is a tragedy, a million dead, a statistic”. Something similar can be said at this point in time about the recurrent homicidal crime perpetrated by national and imported criminal organizations. There are so many extreme episodes that the initial astonishment has given way to a growing naturalization of them. We are witnessing a systematic violence which, if not eradicated, risks becoming endemic and which, by the way, is an essential problem of our democracy.
However, the real disease comes from our highest authorities, both in the Executive and Legislative branches. It permeates sometimes the Judiciary, and frequently autonomous institutions such as the Public Prosecutor’s Office. There is a deliberate denial of the law. The “picardía criolla” to try to make the mandatory vote a dead letter or judicial rulings such as the one that declared inadmissible a complaint of the INDH for prosecuting crimes other than those authorized by its own Law 20.405 or the one that deemed illegal and arbitrary a circular of the director of the SII to apply an additional tax on alcoholic beverages, reflect the crisis of the rule of law in Chile. A pattern of conduct is repeated: those who exercise or hold certain powers by mandate of the Constitution and the law, exceed their scope and arrogate to themselves powers that they do not have. In the end, each one is a petty tyrant, who, in his space of power, forgets all limits.
For the same reason, Kant’s old question, ¿quid ius?, what is law, is more valid than ever. In times when opportunism and residual convenience are imposed to legislate, without the law claiming neither truth nor wisdom nor justice, it is necessary to react. Political acts and definitions have consequences. In the case of Chile the coup attempt of 2019 and the rampage with which the then opposition condoned violence and confronted the government, undermined the democratic rules that gave stability. Law is not a mere expression of legal formalities that reigns where conflict exists or is possible, but defines the foundations on which the development of a country rests. Only its validity and the resulting legal certainty of establishing how everyone should behave ensure the peace and order that citizens need.
Column written by Gabriel Zaliasnik | Partner
