Case: Constitutional Court vs. Peru. Merits, Reparations and Costs

Descriptors: Judicial Independence / Due Process before the administration / Court's Impartiality

On May 28, 1997, three judges of the Constitutional Court of Peru were removed from their positions as a result of a political trial approved by the National Congress, a decision against the judges filed several recursos de amparo, all of them rejected.

In its judgment, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights specifies that the right to due process, the right to be heard, is not limited only to the scope of the judicial process, but also to the administrative procedures that are heard before other State's organs. In the case sub judice, the Court considers that Congress should have conducted itself impartially and independently, granting the judges a political trial with all the guarantees, to be heard and to be able to articulate their defense. Some guarantees that, however, were not heeded, so it ends up considering the existence of a violation of Article 8.1 of the Convention, which in turn would have broken the principle of judicial independence.

Likewise, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights considers that Article 25 of the Convention, regarding judicial protection, has been violated, since the dismissed judges lacked an effective domestic remedy to defend their rights, suffering undue delays in the resolution of their proceedings, and depriving them also of their right to an impartial Tribunal. The Inter-American Court concludes that those who made up the Constitutional Court that rejected the amparos were people who had participated as an accusation in the proceedings in Congress.

A dismissal process that, together with the violations that it entailed for the rights of the appellants, implied a violation of Article 1.1 of the Convention, since the judges remotion and the subsequent omission of the appointment of new magistrates, erga omnes infringed the capacity of the Constitutional Court to carry out the judicial review, because for this the law of the Court itself required a favorable vote of six of the seven magistrates.

Read the decision