The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court became the great protector of President Nicolás Maduro. Not only did it reject all appeals and challenges against the election on April 14, 2013, which led Maduro to power, but the judges also fined and initiated a criminal investigation against opposition leader Henrique Capriles, for the mere fact of complaining about the biased actions of public authorities.
In the controversial case of complaints of alleged irregularities in the 2013 presidential elections, all roads led to the Constitutional Court, which – in their words – “decided to hear all such claims, with the ultimate aim of protecting the political rights of citizens, the public interest, institutional peace and constitutional public order, and due to the national and international significance of the result of the process.”
Therefore, the claim filed by the defence team of former candidate Capriles on May 2, 2013, before the Electoral Chamber ended up being settled by the Constitutional Court. Counsellors of the opposition leader demanded the absolute annulment of the elections won by Maduro, based on the assumption that it was flawed and represented a “fraud” on the will of the people.
While pointing out that the “abuses” before and during the vote favoured the ruling party candidate, representatives of the Unidad warned at the time that “all requests made to date to perform a comprehensive audit have been arbitrarily rejected or delayed by the CNE (National Electoral Council), which is reluctant to allow public, transparent and objective examination of all relevant documents and information on the elections.”
In his claim, Capriles included a list of illegal acts that, in his view, proved the unfair tactics used by Maduro to win the elections. He accused the Constitutional Court of issuing rulings that underpinned the chavista candidate, and he also reported that officials from the legislative, Citizen and Electoral Branches held “official public administration events with electoral purposes.”
In its response, published on August 7, 2013, the judges rejected Capriles’s arguments and also imposed a fine of 10,700 bolivars for expressing “offensive and disrespectful opinions against this Court and other public entities.” The Court then announced its decision to forward the case to the Public Prosecutor “in order to conduct a detailed analysis of the documents and to initiate the investigations it deems necessary to establish the criminal liability that may apply.”
As the blindfolded lady saw no evidence of fraud anywhere in the process, the last hopes of the opposition to examine what happened on April 14, 2013, vanished, and Nicolás Maduro was secured in power, as ordered by his mentor, Hugo Chávez before he died.”
Extract of the judgment
“(…) The petitioners not only incurred (…) contempt towards the authority of the Judiciary which, paradoxically, came to their defence, but they have radically accused – on several occasions and through different means – the judiciary and in particular the Constitutional Court, as a completely biased entity and even dared to say that this Supreme Court acted along the government party lines (…) It is (…) inappropriate to protect a legally and constitutionally established legal situation and to appeal to a court to point out, as a premise, that the established mechanisms are not to be trusted, in order to undermine and compromise the action of the Judiciary, accusing its members of violating their constitutional mandate, of seeking to compromise their independence and impartiality through the media exposure of a conflict. (…) the petitioners do not come to Court in order to resolve a dispute, but to accuse the arbiter for not submitting to their plans and intentions…”