Observing the Observatory. An analysis of the Observatory of Corruption Cases of the Judiciary

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By Ale­jan­dra Del Puerto*

The Ob­ser­va­tory of Ju­di­cial Cases and, specif­i­cally, the sec­tion of Em­blem­atic Cases of Cor­rup­tion (Ob­ser­va­tory, here­inafter), is an ini­tia­tive pro­moted by civil so­ci­ety and in­stalled by the Supreme Court of Jus­tice (CSJ) to strengthen the mech­a­nisms of trans­parency and cit­i­zen con­trol. In this ar­ti­cle we will an­a­lyze what this plat­form con­sists of, how it was cre­ated, what con­tent can be found and in what for­mat it is pre­sented.

The Ob­ser­va­tory is a dig­i­tal plat­form hosted on the web­page of the Supreme Court of Jus­tice, where there is a list of em­blem­atic cases linked to acts of cor­rup­tion (see Fig­ure 1). It was cre­ated in Au­gust 2019 by the Co­or­di­nadora de Abo­ga­dos del Paraguay (COAPY here­inafter), a civil so­ci­ety or­ga­ni­za­tion that brings to­gether lawyers who fight to im­prove the ad­min­is­tra­tion of and ac­cess to jus­tice. It was in­sti­tuted as a watch­dog of cases of pun­ish­able acts of cor­rup­tion to com­bat im­punity.

Fig­ure 1: Im­age of the Ob­ser­va­tory of the Ju­di­cia­ry’s web­site

The re­quest to set up this Ob­ser­va­tory arose from the ur­gent need to make cor­rup­tion cases trans­par­ent. This tool was nec­es­sary to iden­tify the ac­tors in­volved in these processes – de­fen­dants, pros­e­cu­tors, de­fense at­tor­neys, judges – and to know the sta­tus of the cases and how they were be­ing han­dled. Be­fore the Ob­ser­va­tory, the is­sue of trans­parency in these processes was greatly prob­lem­atic.

It hap­pens that pun­ish­able cases of cor­rup­tion af­fect the “pub­lic” and, as such, in­di­vid­u­als, and so­ci­ety as a whole. There­fore, the Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tor’s Of­fice must en­sure that the cases move for­ward quickly, some­thing we hardly no­tice in the Paraguayan jus­tice sys­tem. With­out other par­ties dri­ving these processes, cor­rup­tion cases ended up in the courts and tri­bunals with­out be­ing iden­ti­fied as such, with­out ad­vanc­ing in the cor­re­spond­ing pro­ce­dural stages, re­main­ing dor­mant. This sit­u­a­tion clearly ben­e­fited those in­volved in the process, who could act or not act, with­out any kind of con­trol or pub­lic scrutiny, ac­cord­ing to Es­ther Roa, pres­i­dent of COAPY.  Hence the need for the Ob­ser­va­tory. Roa has been one of the main rea­sons why the Ob­ser­va­tory was cre­ated and is up to date.

The Ob­ser­va­to­ry’s evo­lu­tion has been re­mark­able. At its in­cep­tion, the Ob­ser­va­tory first had 50 em­blem­atic cases. As of July 2023, af­ter al­most 4 years of op­er­a­tions, there are over 120 up­dated files. The files loaded are linked to im­por­tant po­lit­i­cal fig­ures or peo­ple from the in­ner cir­cles of power groups. Car­los Por­tillo, Darío Messer, Pa­tri­cia Samu­dio, Froilán Per­alta, Erico Galeano and Hugo Javier González are some of the most well-known de­fen­dants. The files re­fer to in­di­ca­tions of crimes such as fraud, in­flu­ence ped­dling, smug­gling, breach of trust, among oth­ers. In other words, they are acts of cor­rup­tion, re­lated to the abuse of power or per­sonal ben­e­fit at the ex­pense of pub­lic in­ter­ests.

Hav­ing the sta­tus of these and other rel­e­vant cases is a great achieve­ment in terms of ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion and trans­parency. How­ever, de­spite the progress, there are still some dif­fi­cul­ties and is­sues to im­prove the plat­form.

The in­for­ma­tion gath­ered at the Ob­ser­va­tory is still lim­ited. This is due to sev­eral fac­tors. For ex­am­ple, no pro­vi­sion or reg­u­la­tion es­tab­lishes the cri­te­ria used to de­ter­mine what makes a case em­blem­atic, which gives way to sub­jec­tive in­ter­pre­ta­tions and, there­fore, to pos­si­ble dis­crep­an­cies in the cri­te­ria for up­load­ing some cases and not oth­ers. Pur­suant to CSJ Res­o­lu­tion 1666, cases are in­cor­po­rated at the re­quest of lawyers’ as­so­ci­a­tions, the me­dia or the pub­lic, pro­vided that the CSJ Su­per­in­ten­dence Coun­cil de­ter­mines that they are em­blem­atic, with­out fur­ther de­tails to de­fine the cri­te­ria for this de­ter­mi­na­tion.

To date, the vast ma­jor­ity of cases have been filed at the re­quest of one or two or­ga­ni­za­tions -COAPY and So­mos An­ti­cor­rup­ción PY-, when­ever they be­came aware of the ex­is­tence of cases linked to acts of cor­rup­tion. A con­se­quence of this is that not all cases of cor­rup­tion com­mit­ted by au­thor­i­ties or pub­lic of­fi­cials are on the page. It is enough to see that cases such as “Dany Xavier Du­rand Es­pínola y otros s/​estafa y otros” -for­mer con­gress­man and for­mer min­is­ter of ur­ban­ism-, “Os­car Boidanich Fer­reira, Raquel Cuevas y Melisa Par­odi s/ lavado de dinero y otros” -for­mer min­is­ter of SEPRELAD- and “Mario Al­fredo Vega Mere­les y otros s/ co­he­cho pa­sivo agravado y otros” -for­mer head of IN­DERT- are not in the Ob­ser­va­tory and are wait­ing to be up­loaded.

An­other lim­i­ta­tion has to do with the Ob­ser­va­to­ry’s op­er­at­ing mech­a­nism. Ac­cord­ing to the rul­ing 1666, the in­for­ma­tion must be man­u­ally up­dated every two weeks. This im­plies that the of­fi­cial in charge of mon­i­tor­ing a case must com­mu­ni­cate with the court in ques­tion, in­quir­ing about de­vel­op­ments in the case file to up­load the in­for­ma­tion ob­tained to the plat­form. This does not hap­pen. Es­ther Roa com­mented (to the au­thor of this ar­ti­cle) that they must con­stantly sub­mit notes to the CSJ re­quest­ing the up­date of the files in the Ob­ser­va­tory and, not only that, but also in­di­cate er­rors in the data up­loaded in the cases. Not to men­tion that in ad­di­tion to mon­i­tor­ing the in­for­ma­tion of the Ob­ser­va­tory, al­most daily they sub­mit ur­gent notes to the courts and tri­bunals to pro­mote the progress of the files, urg­ing the judges to is­sue and sanc­tion. There­fore, there is no cer­tainty of hav­ing the most up­dated in­for­ma­tion at the time of re­view­ing the files.

An­other dif­fi­culty is the way in which the in­for­ma­tion is pre­sented. Al­though it is pos­si­ble to find the de­tails of the pro­ceed­ings, the for­mat in which the in­for­ma­tion is dis­played makes it dif­fi­cult to an­a­lyze and process. The cases are pre­sented in an un­num­bered list, clas­si­fied in al­pha­bet­i­cal or­der, ac­cord­ing to the name on the cover page of the file, with­out a search en­gine to fa­cil­i­tate find­ing the in­for­ma­tion ac­cord­ing to cri­te­ria of in­ter­est that can be es­tab­lished by the users. There­fore, to find a spe­cific file, one must look through the list one by one.

An­other prob­lem is that the in­for­ma­tion for each case is up­loaded in a PDF doc­u­ment. In the ab­sence of a user-friendly sys­tem or soft­ware for search­ing in­for­ma­tion, it is not pos­si­ble to per­form ad­vanced searches to quickly see, for ex­am­ple, case trends over time, the evo­lu­tion of fre­quency, lo­cal­i­ties, courts in­volved and key words that al­low the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of cases, among other use­ful cri­te­ria.

The request to set up this Observatory arose from the urgent need to make corruption cases transparent. This tool was necessary to identify the actors involved in these processes – defendants, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges – and to know the status of the cases and how they were being handled. Before the Observatory, the issue of transparency in these processes was greatly problematic

Fi­nally, the Ob­ser­va­tory is not very user-friendly for a pub­lic not spe­cial­ized in law. Those who are not fa­mil­iar with le­gal processes or ter­mi­nol­ogy will prob­a­bly have dif­fi­culty un­der­stand­ing the in­for­ma­tion avail­able. This cre­ates bar­ri­ers for aca­d­e­mics from dis­ci­plines such as so­cial sci­ences, jour­nal­ists from re­search ar­eas, un­der­grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate stu­dents. And we know that an Ob­ser­va­tory that is not ob­served is of lit­tle use.

In con­clu­sion, it re­mains to high­light the fact that hav­ing an Ob­ser­va­tory of this type rep­re­sents a valu­able ef­fort to strengthen trans­parency and ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion in Paraguay. This plat­form makes it pos­si­ble to bring to light and mon­i­tor cases linked to peo­ple whose ac­tions have caused harm to so­ci­ety; it makes it pos­si­ble to con­trol judges and pros­e­cu­tors who carry out the processes; and it fa­cil­i­tates the pro­mo­tion of greater aware­ness of acts of cor­rup­tion among cit­i­zens, of­fi­cials, and au­thor­i­ties, show­ing which acts of cor­rup­tion are pros­e­cuted, con­victed and those that are not. At least that should be its pur­pose. How­ever, in this first re­view we no­ticed that the op­er­a­tion of the Ob­ser­va­tory is not yet prop­erly in­sti­tu­tion­al­ized. With­out the work and fol­low-up of civil so­ci­ety we would not have the in­for­ma­tion we are able to ob­tain to­day.

* Ale­jan­dra Del Puerto holds a Mas­ter’s De­gree in Ad­vanced Pub­lic Man­age­ment from the Uni­ver­sity of Barcelona.

This ar­ti­cle is pub­lished in the frame­work of the ini­tia­tive “Young con­trol for bet­ter pub­lic man­age­ment”, pro­moted by the In­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary Cen­ter for So­cial Re­search (CIIS) with sup­port from the CIRD, within the frame­work of the More Cit­i­zen­ship, Less Cor­rup­tion pro­ject.

Cover im­age: Ju­di­ciary of Paraguay