Guatemala: Courts Jeopardizing Fight Against Impunity

November 12, 2017 7:00PM EST
Efforts to Prosecute Abuse, Corruption at Risk

(Guatemala City) – The remarkable progress Guatemala has made in prosecuting corruption and abuse could be reversed if the country’s highest courts don’t stop the egregious delays that are keeping powerful defendants from going to trial, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 56-page report, “Running Out the Clock: How Guatemala’s Judiciary Could Doom the Fight against Impunity,” documents a pattern of repeated and unjustifiable delays in criminal cases brought by the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) and the Guatemalan Attorney General’s Office.

“The fight against impunity in Guatemala has reached a critical moment,” said Daniel Wilkinson, managing director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch. “After surviving desperate efforts by the president and congress to sabotage its work, the UN-sponsored commission investigating corruption and abuse must now contend with a judicial branch whose failures could prevent its most critical cases from ever going to trial.”

In August 2017, President Jimmy Morales ordered the expulsion of the CICIG commissioner, Iván Velásquez. In September, Congress sought to eviscerate the laws that CICIG and the Attorney General’s Office are using to prosecute cases of corruption and abuse of power. The Constitutional Court blocked both efforts, after tens of thousands of Guatemalans took to the street in protest and the human rights ombudsman filed appeals.

Since CICIG began operation in 2007, Guatemala has made enormous progress in promoting accountability for abuses of power. The most dramatic breakthrough came in 2015, when the joint efforts of CICIG and local prosecutors exposed multiple corruption schemes, implicating officials in all three branches of government, and prompting the resignation and arrest of then-President Otto Pérez Molina.

More:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/12/guatemala-courts-jeopardizing-fight-against-impunity