Assembly ignored most of President’s revisions to a law on the use of force

Freedom of Expression

On August 6 the National Assembly admitted only one of the 21 observations presented by the president, Guillermo Lasso, to the law regulating the legitimate and proportional use of force by police and armed forces agents, which had been sanctioned on June 7 by a large legislative majority.

Which points were objected to by the Executive Branch? The following are some of the most important proposals:

• Eliminate the principle of exceptionality in the monopoly of the legitimate use of public force (Article 1).
• To suppress accountability as a principle that sustains the legitimate use of force, since it is already regulated by the Organic Law of Citizen Participation (article 10).
• Reformulate the clauses that recognize the right of security agents to refuse to obey orders from superiors that violate human rights or are illegitimate (article 17, paragraph c) and to not be subject to criminal or administrative prosecution for such action (article 19).
• Extend the possibility of action by the Armed Forces to states of emergency, and not only of exception (article 21) and review the principles that govern it, in particular the one that applies to the articulation with the work of the National Police (article 31).
• Explicitly recognize that security agents do not commit any criminal offense in the fulfillment of their legal duty, unless there is abuse or deviation (article 54) and the right to receive specialized legal representation from the Public Defender’s Office (article 65).
• Limit the scope of action of the Specialized Unit of the Attorney General’s Office to cover only cases of death or injury caused by an agent in which the improper use of force is presumed, instead of all (article 68).

Ultimately, the Assembly dismissed all of these remarks by 96 votes in favor and 40 abstentions, except for one that aimed to eliminate the possibility of establishing sub-levels within the levels of use of force. Which blocs abstained? Basically, the members of the Acuerdo Nacional Bloc, aligned with the national government, the members of Partido Social Cristiano and some independents. The government, for its part, issued a statement in which it expressed that it will make use of its power to regulate the Law and from there “recognize to the National Police what today the Legislative has denied it”.

Thus, the Armed Forces will only be able to act in matters of internal security in an exceptional and complementary manner and when a state of exception is declared. This is not a minor aspect in a country where the use of emergency resources has become recurrent in the last year due to the worsening of internal insecurity.

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On August 14, a 30-day state of emergency was declared in the city of Guayaquil after a bomb explosion killed 5 people and injured 26 others, as well as causing serious material damage. The Minister of the Interior, Patricio Castillo, described it as an “act of terrorism” linked to drug trafficking. The declaration issued by President Guillermo Lasso suspends several constitutional rights, including freedom of assembly and the inviolability of the home. A recent report by Latin America Risk Report notes that so far this year there have been more than 70 bomb attacks in Guayaquil, although this is the first to occur in a residential area.

🟡Rating Civicus: OBSTRUCTED