Human Rights Botch: Vivanco & Venezuela
By Al Giordano,
Posted on Thu Jun 17th, 2004 at 03:04:21 PM EST
José Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch today launched a
media-attention-seeking attack on the Venezuelan government for a new law
providing a process for impeachment of Supreme Court justices in that
country. He held a press conference in Caracas, barking highly charged
words in a report titled Venezuela: Judicial Independence Under Siege.
Vivanco and Human Rights Watch are now on record opposing a U.S.-modeled
impeachment process for Supreme Court justices in Venezuela. The timing -
two months before the August 15 referendum in that country - is obviously
a
partisan attempt to meddle in electoral politics.
Perhaps Vivanco and his bureaucrats should have done a little bit of
research on the United States Constitution and American History before
demonstrating such ignorance about democratic principles.
Before this essay is done, we will hear from Thomas Jefferson and
Franklin
Delano Roosevelt - whose stated principles on the appointment and
impeachment of Supreme Court justices HRW has now gone against with this
maneuver - on this question. But first let's consult a more recent U.S.
president who spoke on this issue… Gerald R. Ford…
Four years before becoming president of the United States, Republican
Congressman Gerald Ford spoke on the floor of the House of
Representatives,
calling for the impeachment, under the provisions allowed by the U.S.
Constitution, of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.
Ford said:
What, then, is an impeachable offense? The only honest answer is
that
an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of
Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history;
conviction
results from whatever offense or offenses two-thirds of the other body
considers to be sufficiently serious to require removal of the accused
from
office.
- Source: Congressional Record #11,913 (1970), 116th Congress
The title of the Human Rights Watch report creates an impression that,
prior to the presidency of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela had "judicial
independence." That is a knowingly false statement, because in the text
of
the report, Vivanco and HRW admit that it never has had it. Their cruel
joke against human rights is revealed by the inflammatory, knowingly
false,
language they use against a new judicial reform law in Venezuela.
The HRW report claims:
The new law, which President Chávez signed last month, expands the
Supreme Court from 20 to 32 members. It empowers Chávez’s governing
coalition to use its slim majority in the legislature to obtain an
overwhelming majority of seats on the Supreme Court. The law also gives
the
governing coalition the power to nullify existing judges’ appointments
to
the bench.
Fact Check: The Venezuelan judicial impeachment process is virtually
identical to that in the United States (a process about which the
beltway-based Vivanco has been wholly silent for the entirety of his
career). No authentic democracy can survive without the checks and
balances
that allow removal of court justices by Congress.
The United States constitution also provides for use of a "slim majority"
to appoint Supreme Court Justices. (Remember the U.S. Senate battle over
the nomination of Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas? Only fifty-percent
plus one vote was required to install him: the same exact process that
the
hypocrite Vivanco attacks in Venezuela.).
With less than two months to go before the historic August 15th
referendum
(to recall or ratify the term of President Hugo Chavez: the voters will
decide), Vivanco and Human Rights Watch's partisan political agenda
stands
naked. Instead of praising Venezuela for being the only country on earth
that allows citizens to recall their president, and that has recently
shown
its commitment to that process, Vivanco is throwing tomatoes at a process
that, although it exists in many other countries including the United
States, he and his organization have remained totally silent about in
other
lands.
Impeachment of Supreme Court Justices is a vital right for any authentic
democracy. As recently as this young century, the National Lawyers Guild
seriously considered a campaign to impeach the five U.S. Supreme Court
justices who appointed George W. Bush as president, ratifying a stolen
election.
As the quote from former President Ford, above, reveals, the right to
impeach U.S. Supreme Court justices for any "offense" that " of the House
of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history." That
is how a system of checks and balances works. Vivanco has thus harmed
Human
Rights Watch's credibility around the world with this latest
grandstanding
maneuver.
National Lawyers Guild vice president Nathan Newman wrote of this process
in the United States:
In fact, over the course of American history, the House of
Representatives has impeached fifteen individuals, including two
Presidents, twelve judges, a senator, and a cabinet member. The Senate
has
convicted seven of the fifteen… Most were impeached for acts of
personal
impropriety but a number of others have been impeached strictly for their
official conduct. The early history of the Republic saw a number of
politically-charged judicial impeachments.
Newman noted:
It is relatively clear that the framers of the Constitution saw
impeachment as an important political check on the judicial branch.
Notably, judges were to serve during "good behavior" subject to
impeachment. During the Constitutional Convention, George Mason ignited
the
debate about what should constitute an impeachable offense under the
Constitution. At first, the only proposed impeachable offenses were
treason
and bribery, but Mason believed that "attempts to subvert the
Constitution
may not be Treason" but should be recognized as an impeachable offense.
Mason proposed that "maladministration" be added to the list of offenses
but, after some debate, Mason replaced it with the phrase "other high
Crimes and misdemeanors." The delegates then passed that recommendation
eight to three without further debate.
Newman also notes that William Taft, the only man to serve as both Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court and President of the United States, said:
Under the authoritative construction by the highest court of
impeachment, the Senate of the United States, a high misdemeanor for
which
a judge may be removed is misconduct involving bad faith or wantoness
[sic]
or recklessness in his judicial actions, or in the use of his official
influence for ulterior purposes. By the liberal interpretation of the
term
"high misdemeanor" which the Senate has given there is now no difficulty
in
securing the removal of a judge for any reason that shows him unfit.
Read the U.S. Constitution, Jose:
Article I, Section 2
Clause 5: The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and
other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.
Article I, Section 3
Clause 6: The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all
Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or
Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief
Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the
Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.
Clause 7: Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further
than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any
Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party
convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial,
Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.
In plain English, that means that the U.S. House of Representatives may
vote to "impeach" (that is to say, to hold a kind of trial seeking
removal
of any federal official, including Supreme Court justices). The "trial"
is
held in the Senate. The Vice President presides over the impeachment of
any
Supreme Court justice. The votes of two thirds of the senators present
are
required to remove the justice.
In fact, the great democrat Thomas Jefferson and his supporters utilized
this Constitutional process to impeach Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase
in 1804. Jefferson lost the vote in the Senate. And that is how the
process
works.
The same is true for Venezuela. The new provisions for impeachment of
Supreme Court justices are in the letter and spirit of Jeffersonian
democracy.
The other complaint by Vivanco and Human Rights Watch is that they oppose
the effort by President Hugo Chavez and the Congress to expand the number
of Supreme Court Justices from 20 to 32.
Rising in rebuttal, courtesy of audio archives, I call my first witness:
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States, who valiantly
tried to expand the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices. This testimony
is from the transcript of Roosevelt's Fireside Chat radio program, on
March
9, 1937. Roosevelt had proposed the retirement of Supreme Court judges at
the age of 70, and if any judge chose not to retire at 70, an additional
member would be added to the Court. For that, Roosevelt was accused of
"packing" the Court:
What is my proposal? It is simply this: whenever a judge or justice
of
any federal court has reached the age of seventy and does not avail
himself
of the opportunity to retire on a pension, a new member shall be
appointed
by the president then in office, with the approval, as required by the
Constitution, of the Senate of the United States…
That plan has two chief purposes. By bringing into the judicial
system
a steady and continuing stream of new and younger blood, I hope, first,
to
make the administration of all federal justice, from the bottom to the
top,
speedier and, therefore, less costly; secondly, to bring to the decision
of
social and economic problems younger men who have had personal experience
and contact with modern facts and circumstances under which average men
have to live and work. This plan will save our national Constitution from
hardening of the judicial arteries.
The number of judges to be appointed would depend wholly on the
decision of present judges now over seventy, or those who would
subsequently reach the age of seventy…
Those opposing this plan have sought to arouse prejudice and fear by
crying that I am seeking to "pack" the Supreme Court and that a baneful
precedent will be established…
Is it a dangerous precedent for the Congress to change the number of
the justices? The Congress has always had, and will have, that power. The
number of justices has been changed several times before, in the
administrations of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson - both of them signers
of the Declaration of Independence - in the administrations of Andrew
Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant.
It should be embarrassing enough to Human Rights Watch directors,
members,
and donors, that Vivanco now places the organization in direct historic
opposition to human rights heroes like Thomas Jefferson and Franklin
Delano
Roosevelt. It's worse that he reveals complete ignorance on the true
provisions of Venezuela's judicial reform.
A simple Google News search would have unearthed Greg Wilpert's recent
painstaking explanation, in clear English, of what the reform does and
does
not do:
Supreme Court Law: Constitutional Dictatorship or Stronger Rule of
Law?
As if the confrontations over the recall referendum and the
paramilitary presence were not enough, pro-Chavez legislators have
recently
passed a highly controversial new Supreme Court law. Venezuela's 1999
constitution requires such a new law and also specifies that the entire
judicial system is subordinated, not just procedurally, but also
administratively to the Supreme Court. Most of the law's 29 articles are
relatively uncontroversial. However, three provisions in the new law have
raised the opposition's ire.
First, the new law increases the number of Supreme Court judges from
20 to 32. The opposition says that such an increase is unwarranted and
that
it would allow Chavez and his supporters to pack the court all over
again,
now that only half of the current judges appear to be sympathetic to the
government. Government supporters, however, argue that the current number
of judges is insufficient for the case load of the court and that the
current number of judges corresponds to the old Supreme Court of the 1961
constitution which had only three chambers, while the new one has six.
Second, the new Supreme Court law allows judges to be named with s
simple majority, should three previous efforts to name judges with the
constitutionally required two-thirds majority fail. Here the opposition
argues that this subverts the previous two-thirds majority requirement
that
the earlier Supreme Court law had set, allowing the legislature to name
judges with a simple majority. Pro-Chavez legislators point out, though,
that given the current impasse in the nearly evenly divided legislature,
an
escape hatch for naming judges must be found.
Besides, naming judges by simple majority is not all that unusual in
the international context. U.S. Supreme Court judges, for example, do not
need more than a simple majority.
Third, the new law allows the legislature to suspend judges who are
accused of wrong-doing, until a trial is held. Also, should a judge be
found to have lied about fulfilling the pre-requisites for being named a
judge, that judge's naming may be reversed with a simple majority vote of
the legislature. Here the opposition argues that this provision makes
reduces the independence of judges because the legislature could threaten
them with removal. This would certainly be the case if judges are named
who
do not fulfill all of the requirements set by the constitution or those
who
commit a crime.
However, this type of suspension or removal is not all that easy in
that it depends upon the cooperation from another independent branch of
the
state, the attorney general's office. In other words, it hinges upon just
how independent the judicial and the "moral"[3] branches are from each
other. Structurally, according to the constitution, these branches are
completely independent from each other, in that no other branch, such as
the executive, can remove them at will.
Given the opposition's suspicion of any action that will give the
government an advantage, especially in the Supreme Court, which is one of
the last state bastions (besides the National Assembly) where the
opposition still has an important share of power, it should not come as a
surprise that they would do just about anything to stop the law. As a
matter of fact, on several occasions the opposition organized exhausting
24-hour filibusters in their efforts to stop the law from passing.
It is difficult to identify to what extent the opposition's
resistance
to the Supreme Court law is born of a real fear of Venezuela becoming a
"constitutional dictatorship" and to what extent it comes from protecting
their "turf."
José Vivanco is either ignorant of United States law and the true
provisions of Venezuela law, or he is being dishonest enough to "play
along" with this latest smear campaign against Venezuela and its
Bolivarian
Constitution and democratically-elected government.
Vivanco and Human Rights Watch - a bureaucrat and an organization that
both
went AWOL during the April 2002 coup d'etat in Venezuela: HRW, with a
cowardice that shall live in infamy, was completely silent on the abuses
committed, crossing its fingers, hoping the coup would succeed, until the
coup was over - would do better to invest their attention on real human
rights abuses in this hemisphere: the tortures in Guantanamo Bay, for
example, where the screams of the victims occur today and tonight, but
cannot be heard through Jose Vivanco's partisan earplugs.
Instead, Vivanco is in Venezuela today, attacking that country in
knowingly
false and inflammatory terms for doing nothing more or less than what the
host government of Human Rights Watch has wisely done in its own land for
more than two centuries. If HRW were doing its job according to its
stated
mission, it would be supporting the new provisions in Venezuela, and
instead using its multi-million dollar budget to call for the use of such
time-honored impeachment provisions in the United States to remove the
justices that imposed a Court-Appointed torturer to that country's
highest
office.
Heard or not, the screams continue today from Guantanamo, from Colombia,
from the cell of Pacho Cortes in Bolivia, and not to mention from Iraq
and
so many other torture chambers throughout the world. How low does José
Vivanco's cowardice go to further muzzle the sound of those screams by
wasting his organization's time and money to create a media show across
the
Caribbean that only distracts from the real human rights crises in our
hemisphere?
If anyone should be impeached from a job of arbitor or judge of anything
in
our América, it is José Miguel Vivanco.
________________________________________________________________
The best thing to hit the Internet in years - Juno SpeedBand!
Surf the Web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER!
Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!
_______________________________________________
Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
