Lady Justice does not help to disseminate the policies on the elimination of violence against women. The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court refused to demand the Ministry of Women and Gender Equality to offer information about that issue.
The director of civil association Espacio Público, Carlos Correa, appeared before the TSJ on March 19, 2012, after hitting the wall of opacity erected by Minister Nancy Pérez Sierra. Correa had posed three questions to Pérez Sierra’s office:
- Which of the Vice Ministries manages programmes aimed at the prevention, monitoring and policies regarding Violence Against Women?
- Is there a Plan for Prevention of Violence Against Women? If so, we hereby request copies of the plan.
- What are the main results of the programmes on violence against women experienced in the course of implementation of these public policies in the years 2008, 2009 and 2010?
The answer to these three questions: silence. Then, Correa called for the intervention of the Supreme Court, which on May 23, 2012, appealed to formalities to stay out of this issue. The presenting judge, Gladys Gutierrez, argued that the representative of Espacio Público should have used other “legal remedies” before raising the issue at the Supreme Court.
With this ruling, the judges made it clear that they prefer to handle the details, rather than dealing with the core issue of the lack of transparency. Article 51 of the Constitution states that “everyone has the right to petition or make representations before any authority or public official on matters within their competence and to obtain timely and adequate response”; furthermore, Article 141 states: “Public Administration must serve citizens and is based on the principles of honesty, participation, swiftness, effectiveness, efficiency, transparency, accountability and responsibility in the exercise of public functions, being fully subject to the law.”
Extract of the judgment
[The petitioners] had at their disposal the claim of inaction as an existing legal means (…) the constitutional duty of civil servants to provide timely and adequate response to any request is an objectively and subjectively specific obligation. (…) Consequently, the petitioner cannot… with the appeal for protection, substitute the existing judicial means, because this action is subject to the fact that the petitioner has not fulfilled such pre-existing judicial remedies, or that, even with the existence thereof, they do not allow the restoration of the infringed legal situation.