Legislative Procedure

DECISION C-760/2001. LEGISLATIVE PROCEDURE

The Court studied the claim of unconstitutionality against the Law No. 600 of 2000, “By means of which is issued the Criminal Procedure Code”. The plaintiff alleged that the disposition violated the articles 150 (num. 2 and 10), 151, 157 (num. 1, 2, 3) and 160 of the Political Constitution. In his judgment, the legislative process that concluded on the expedition of the Law No. 600 had a series of flaws, e.g., (i) it didn’t count with the required quorum,(ii) the text of the draft wasn’t known by the Representatives and therefore, (iii) there wasn’t debate about the text of the draft approved by the plenary of the Chamber of Representatives.

In this issue, this Constitutional Tribunal studied the procedure that the draft took place in the Congress, and observed that the 6^th of June of 2000, day that the voting took place, the “Ponentes” of the project presented a series of propositions that modified, substituted or suppressed some articles of the draft, as a result of the short term in which those propositions were presented, they were not published, nor read by the Secretary during the session. Therefore, the project that was putted into consideration of the chamber didn’t include the propositions presented, and they didn’t run through the regulatory procedure, for this reason these parts of the text were declared unconstitutional.