Daniel Noboa has finally revealed the questions he intends to ask the country in a public consultation. Big disappointment. If used appropriately, popular consultations are excellent tools for making the people themselves the main actors in the process of institutional transformation. However, in Ecuador popular consultation has been reduced to a banal tactic of gaining “political capital”: by asking a few superficial questions that will obviously be answered with “yes”, the executive seeks to achieve an easy “victory”. ” at polling stations that can then be politically capitalized on. That seems to be the real goal of Daniel Noboa and his toy consultancy.

Plebiscite and crucifixion

To begin with, the suggested questions suffer from a fatal error of form. And the thing is that the Executive has not articulated what specific legal effect the reforms it proposes would have. It does not specify which articles of which regulation will be changed or abolished, but that is simply left to the imagination. In some cases, this vagueness is shocking. For example, question four proposes increasing penalties for a range of crimes, including terrorism and contract killings. an issue? Nowhere in the attachments is it indicated how many years of imprisonment would be added to these sentences. The Executive’s own text admits that no concrete reforms are proposed. For example, paragraph 26 of the decree, when discussing question 1, states verbatim that “this question does not call for constitutional or legal reforms, but is aimed at the adoption of concrete measures”, a formula that is repeated throughout the document. These questions, therefore, are not actually proposals for concrete legal reforms, but only aspirational statements, similar to pre-election offers. Precisely because of this, there is a significant probability that the Constitutional Court will not give consent to the questions raised.

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Worse, most of the proposals put forward do not appear to require public consultation to begin with. For example, to increase prison sentences (Question 4) it is simply necessary to reform the Comprehensive Organic Criminal Law, something that only requires the executive to send a bill to Parliament without the need for consultation. The same can be said for questions 3, 5, 6 and 7. Regarding the audit of the assets of judicial officers (question 8), it seems that the executive branch forgets that this is already a function assigned to the chief state inspector, because it is not clear what would exactly what the proposed reform consisted of. In short, not only do the proposed “reforms” not seem like real reforms, but in any case most of them can be implemented directly, without the need for public consultation.

Things are clear. The president proposes toy consultations, unnecessary and poorly planned, which only want to achieve an easy “victory” in the elections, at the expense of the pockets of all Ecuadorians. (OR)