Monday, November 16, 2009

You can't "restore" a president who was illegally "deposed" in the first place

President Manuel Zelaya has made clear, that by quitting to his restitution, he is not quitting to his Presidency.

Let's not mix apple and oranges like a lot of media are doing at the moment (as usual and expected):

1. A president who is recognized by the whole world in spite of the illegal decree the National Congress issued to separate the president from office, including the United Nations, the OAS, UNASUR, the European Union, the Rio Group and all nations around the globe, cannot be restituted, otherwise everyone would be contradicting themselves. He is the President, end of story.

2. As stated by the President in his letter to Obama, where he quits to his restitution and to the deal that is supposed to bring him back to power, and where he quits to being object of legitimizing a coup d'état:

The Congress of the Republic issued an illegal decree where it ordered "To separate the citizen José Manuel Zelaya Rosales from the office of Constitutional President of the Republic" without constitutional abilities to do so, and without due process without any legal ruling being cited

This means, that several laws were broken by the Congress when issuing this decree:
a. It has no faculties to "depose" a president according to the Constitution of Honduras, for it has no faculties to interpret the constitution



  • The Supreme Court of Honduras declared it UNCONSTITUTIONAL for the National Congress to interpret the constitution in the verdict issued on May 7, 2003. As such, there exists no legal basis to assert that Congress can interpret the constitution, indirectly constituting a basis for a political verdict permitting the removal of the head of state.

  • In any case, if Congress had the ability to interpret the constitution (which according to the Supreme Court's decision it does not possess) the interpretation would have to state clearly in a decree that the constitutional standard was being interpreted and to clarify thereafter the standards resulting from said interpretation (which was not done in the removal of the president). There is no tacit interpretation of the constitution; the interpretation must be explicit. That is, in the decree calling for the removal of the president it is nowhere stated that interpretation is the basis of the legal power to "declare the illegality and nullity of the administrative act carried out by the Executive Branch" and that the standard that results is the establishment of a legislative procedure of impeachment or political trial.




  • B. Constitución de la República de Honduras, art. 102 (“Ningún hondureño podrá ser expatriado ni entregado por las autoridades a un Estado extranjero”) [hereinafter “Constitution”]. Unofficial translation: “No Honduran can be expatriated or delivered by the authorities to a foreign State.” (This and all other translations of the Constitution in this essay are unofficial translations by the author).

    C.The Honduran Congress chose not to exercise its only relevant constitutional power – to find that there are grounds to prosecute the president, and then to refer his case to the Supreme Court for adjudication.(Presumably it was not content to await the outcome of a criminal trial before the Supreme Court. Instead, it summarily removed the president without so much as a hearing. If interpreted as self-executing, Article 239 would do the same. Either avenue of summary removal is inconsistent with Honduras’ treaty obligations, violative of due process of law, and anti-democratic.


    See various legal documents:
    http://www.asil.org/insights090729.cfm#_edn1
    http://www.boell.de/intlpolitics/latin-america-7760.html


    2. If the President submits himself to an accord that "restitutes" him and it depends on the resolution of the Congress with the counseling of the Supreme Court (the same bodies who issued a fake resignation letter from President Zelaya to name Micheletti President of Honduras), it means that he would be acknowledging that the Congress had the faculty to depose him in the first place. The whole deal was about revoking the illegal decree that oustered him, not about making him President again, so clearly this is just a game to legalize the coup and to grant Congress an action they were never empowered to make in the first place, to legitimize their illegalities, if we acknowledge that they have the power to "restitute" the president, which they never did and don't. The President is still President, he's just not playing the coup regime's and US Dept of State's game.

    There can't be any dialogue when this clearly is a monologue, where the coup regime,. the one with the weapons, does whatever it wants, especially earning time before elections to legitimate the coup.

    _________________________________________________________________________

    The “Removal” of Manuel Zelaya by the Honduran Congress
    If we examine the legal base which sustains the removal of the constitutional President of Honduras, we must look into the “Decree of Deposition” of the President.
    This decree was produced in the wee hours of the morning, after the brutal assault of the Presidents home and his expulsion from the country had already taken place. To this day nobody has been able to determine exactly who and how many of the congressmen involved were present at the time.
    This in itself would suffice to declare the decree and its decision null and void, but before arriving at this conclusion let us examine this “masterpiece” of constitutional violation. The Legislation Decree No. 141-2009 reads as follows:
    ARTICLE 1. The National Congress in applying Articles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 40 number 4, 205 number 20, and 218 number 3, 242, 321, 322, and 323 of the Constitution of the Republic agrees:
    1. to disapprove the behavior of the President of the Republic, citizen JOSE MANUEL ZELAYA ROSALES, for repeated violations of the Constitution of the Republic and the laws and failure to observe the resolutions and verdicts of the organs of legal authority, and
    2. to separate citizen JOSE MANUEL ZELAYA ROSALES from the post of Constitutional President of the Republic of Honduras.
    ARTICLE 2. To promote citizen ROBERTO MICHELETI BAIN, currently President of the National Congress, to the post of Constitutional President of the Republic, for the time which remains to complete the term of office and which expires on the 27th of January 2010.
    ARTICLE 3. The present decree becomes effective at the end of the approval of two-thirds of the vote of members who belong to the National Congress and thereupon the execution is immediate.
    The key words in this decree are ”disapprove”, “separate” and ”promote”. Let us look at them individually:
    DISAPPROVE
    The disapproval of the behavior of any public official of the State is not within the power of the National Congress, but of the Judiciary, and cannot be carried out without previous legal actions being taken. A hearing must be opened against the Official whose case is to be heard.
    In this Trial it is self evident that the accused shall be presumed innocent until the opposite has been proven. It is after due process of law has taken place that the Judiciary may “Disapprove” the behavior of such an Official, and consequences may then ensue in the form of a valid judicial sentencing. Thus, National Congress is here usurping functions that legally do not belong to it.
    SEPARATE
    The President of Honduras is elected by equal and secret vote of the people of Honduras and its citizens, for a period of four years. There is no such thing like an impeachment in the Honduran constitution (as happened to President Nixon in America) and even less some other kind of disposition or rule which allows Congress to remove the President, under no circumstance.
    If it should be considered that the President, or any other public official, has broken the law, due process must be followed to accuse him of such violations as deemed to have taken place. He must be declared in due cause by Congress, and the supposed violation must be proven beyond reasonable doubt.
    PROMOTE
    In the context of the illegal removal of a President this term would be seen as funny, were it not for the serious and tragic consequences it has entailed for the Honduran people. In the first place “promotion” means to be placed in a better situation than the previous one. By implication, this means considering the presidency of the legislative body (Congress) as inferior to the Executive, which in any republican form of Government is ridiculous. The three powers - legislative, judicial and executive - are equal, equally important and honorable.
    If the Constitution does not give Congress the authority to remove the President, much less does it have the legal power to “promote” its own president to preside the Executive branch of State. Congress is here usurping faculties and powers that only the Honduran people have. As if not enough, it reads “constitutionally Promote”, when it is totally clear that nowhere does the Honduran Constitution give this possibility and power to the Honduran Congress.
    The famous Honduran lawyer Edmundo Orellana Mercado comments the following in relation to this Decree: “This Legislative Decree does not resist the slightest legal analysis. It has as many violations of the Constitution as the resolutions it states”.
    It is important to consider the procedure followed - even if illegal - to justify and carry out the removal of the President Zelaya, mainly because it affects his reinstatement. A legal principle in the countries of written law states that “legal decisions are undone by reversing the procedure by which they were carried out”.

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