Fernández announces that he will impeach the President of the Supreme Court of Argentina

In a message published on social networks this Sunday (1st) due to the New Year, the president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, announced that he will ask for political judgment, that is, the impeachment of the head of the Supreme Court of the country, Horacio Rosatti, to that “the performance of their duties be investigated”.

In the post, the Peronist calls on governors to support the request, which would also include the other members of the court. “In recent months, we have seen an inadmissible advance of the Judiciary over the other Powers in Argentina. Several publications, never contradicted, make clear what I have been warning for a long time: the scandalous link between the part of politics and Justice”, he wrote him.

For Fernández, dialogues between Judiciary officials and opposition politicians, in which “decisions are anticipated, and political grounds to be used when deciding cases with institutional transcendence, recommended”, were exposed without punishment “in the face of general astonishment”.

This Sunday’s announcement comes on the heels of another action by the president, who, a day before the decision on the corruption case that convicted his deputy, Cristina Kirchner, ordered the opening of an investigation into an alleged trip that would have been secretly made by a group of media entrepreneurs, prosecutors and judges. Among those targeted was Julián Ercolini, who conducted Cristina’s trial.

The investigation request was made after the revelation of messages in which members of the group allegedly combined strategies to hide the trip. The trip would have taken place on October 13th to Lago Escondido. The group, which would also include officials from the City of Buenos Aires, flew in a private plane and reportedly stayed at the country home of British millionaire Joe Lewis.

The President of the Supreme Court, Rosatti, who was Minister of Justice during Néstor Kirchner’s administration, was appointed to the court in 2015 by Fernández’s predecessor and rival, Mauricio Macri, and is considered, alongside the vice-president of the court, Carlos Rosenkrantz, politically positioned against Kirchnerism.

In February last year, a march against the country’s Supreme Court, with requests for judicial reform, brought together thousands of people in downtown Buenos Aires. One of the central issues of the march was precisely the replacement of magistrates. According to the organizers, the current names are practicing “lawfare”, that is, determining convictions based on political interests.

In December 2022, days before being sentenced to six years in prison in the first instance, with lifelong disqualification from holding public office, Cristina, in theory an ally of Fernández, with whom she lives a troubled relationship, told Sheet being the victim of a “firing squad” and that the accusations are a “falsehood”. Like Lula, she says she would be a victim of “lawfare” — she was accused of heading an illicit association that allocated funds for 51 works in the province of Santa Cruz.

One of Fernández’s campaign promises was a controversial proposal to reform the judiciary. The project, which was approved in the Senate but stalled in the House, would create new regional courts and increase the number of judges in the country and members of the Supreme Court. Instead of 270 new positions, the approved project proposes the creation of 908 new positions in the Judiciary throughout the country.

The government justifies the proposal with the argument that Justice has to be faster and more efficient, and the processing of cases, more organized in regional instances. The opposition, on the other hand, sees in the process an advance by the Executive over the Judiciary, in a way of freeing Cristina from the processes to which she responds.

This Sunday, in his New Year’s message, Fernández highlighted that he must “prevent the Council of the Judiciary from continuing to be manipulated with unusual interpretations that allow the Judiciary to meddle in the decisions of Congress.” “It is my duty to take action when the federal system is put in crisis.”