June 5, 2001, 2:00 pm. Organizmo Judicial de Guatemala, Jolanda Pérez, Presidente

11. Jolanda Pérez is a Magistrate of the Court of Appeal and is also the President of the Judges Association of Guatemala (Organizmo Judicial). 

12. I gave a brief introduction of LRWC and the IDC to Judge Pérez and explained to her that I was in Guatemala to observe the Gerardi trial and to support not only the lawyers involved but also the Judges. I told her that we were aware of the fact that a number of Judges who had been involved in the case had been the subject of threats and that we knew at least one Judge had fled the country.

13. Judge Pérez welcomed me to Guatemala and “joked” that in general things had improved from complete chaos to the current state of crisis. She said that for Judges in Guatemala life was both difficult and complicated and that the threats against Judges had become worse over the past year than they had been in preceding years. She mentioned the seven assassinations of lawyers between October, 2000 and February of this year and noted that the in the same time period there had been over fifty (50) threats levied against Judges alone.  The threats had included a number of assassination attempts.  She also mentioned the lynching of Judge Martinez in the remote locale of Senahú where a local mob, unhappy with one of his decisions, had thrown boulders through the roof of his house until they killed him (see meeting with Leopoldo Liu below for more details). 

14. She noted that there were numerous threats to the independence of Judges in Guatemala and the threats and pressures could come from numerous sectors including:  organized crime, the private sector, the Public Ministry and public officials, the military, and even the Government Office of Human Rights.  She noted that in the interior of the country, the Human Rights Office had been responsible for inciting people against Judges based on making unpopular decisions.  She noted that if the Public Ministry was not happy with a Judge’s decision that quite often the Ministry would lodge a complaint with the Judicial Disciplinary Committee accusing the Judge of complicity with the accused. 

15. Judge Pérez said that the government was largely indifferent to the threats against Judges and that there has not been a single official government pronouncement against the ongoing threats, even when the Judge was lynched in Senahú.  She said that in her opinion there appears to be what amounts to an intentional policy to reduce the legitimacy of the Judiciary.  She said that while the government had created a new office whose mandate was to investigate threats, attacks, and assassinations against people operating in the justice system including judges, lawyers and others, that at this point there were no results of these investigations. In her opinion it was largely a decorative office.  My later meeting with the director of this office (see below) confirmed her view.

16.  Judge Pérez expressed her frustration in having to work under these conditions and with continual threats to judicial independence.  She said that not only do judges in Guatemala face physical lynching but they also face ongoing social lynching as well.  She noted that in Guatemala there is a general lack of legal culture following thirty -six (36) years of war and lawlessness. There is no ability to rebuild the legal culture especially when certain sectors exist that do not want the rule of law to prevail. 

17. She noted that the Judges Association had recently struck a security committee, but that they had few resources to do very much. Their hope was to increase communication with judges located in the interior so as to avoid the type of situation, which happened in Senahú.  The Association is also planning courses on personal security and is also hoping to run courses for a new police force, which will act as guards within the judicial system.  She noted that Judges have no health insurance and no life insurance.

18. She said that the Judges had been encouraged by the visit of the UN Special Rapporteur for Judicial Independence Param Cumaraswamy and that Cumaraswamy had asked to speak with the President of Guatemala immediately following the assassination of the Judge in Senahú.

19. She felt that Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada could contribute immediately by writing letters in support of the security of Judges. I feel that this is especially important in light of the threats, which have been made against the Judges in the Gerardi case following their decision, including the appearance of a military helicopter taking pictures of Judge Jasmin Barrios’s house.

20. Judge Pérez noted that some kind of a judicial exchange could be very interesting especially as in her view, Guatemala represents a kind of small laboratory for viewing all of the problems facing democracy and for examining the fragility of democracy.  She has written an article for Judges in Spain entitled “What it is to a be a Judge in Guatemala” which motivated the Spanish Judges to speak out in solidarity with the Judges in Guatemala.  She will be e-mailing us this article.

21. Interestingly the next day the Guatemalan newspaper El Periòdico ran an article featuring Judge Pérez and announcing the creation of an elite team to guard the security of threatened Judges.  The elite security team will be composed of civilians who will be trained in providing security.  Judge Pérez expressed little optimism that the creation of the security force was going to take care of the ongoing threats to Judges.  She felt that it would be more important to put resources into finding out where the threats come from and capturing those that are issuing such threats and not allowing these people to continue to threaten the Judicial system with impunity.  The creation of the elite force was announced by the Supreme Court of Guatemala and was one of the recommendations in the report of the UN Special Rapporteur Cumaraswamy. 

June 7, 2001 7:00 am Faculty of Law at the University of San Carlos

22. I met with the Director of the Faculty of Law, Carlos Estuardo Gàlvez Barrios and the Academic Co-ordinator Juan Herberto Martinez. The school is the largest law school in Guatemala and San Carlos is the state funded University in Guatemala. The law school takes in approximately three thousand students a year and has two hundred and fifty (250) professors. The school graduates approximately three hundred (300) students each year.  Most practicing lawyers in Guatemala are graduates of the University of San Carlos Law School.