Bolivia’s Constitutional Court eliminates the crime of sedition

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Constitutional Tribunal of Bolivia informed on March 17 that the crime of sedition “is expelled from the Bolivian legal system”. As of the ruling, no one can be prosecuted under this typification.

The president of the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal, Paul Franco, expressed to the media that this decision emerges from an abstract unconstitutionality action filed by former official parliamentarians of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS).

“The unconstitutionality of the crime of sedition has been declared; therefore, as of the notification of the sentence mentioned above, the crime of sedition is expelled from the Bolivian legal system,” said Franco. He added that now “no one can be prosecuted or persecuted” for this crime.

In the same way, he clarified that the action filed for the crime of terrorism was declared “inadmissible” since this lawsuit was based on a regulation that has already been modified and that this court rules on “current laws”.

In 2020, a group of then pro-government parliamentarians filed before the Constitutional Court an action to eliminate the crimes of sedition and terrorism because of a complaint filed by the interim government of Jeanine Áñez against former President Evo Morales under those accusations.

The complaint, filed in 2019 by the then interim Minister of Government (Interior) Arturo Murillo, was for a video that went viral in which a voice attributed to the former Bolivian president incited blockades to prevent the entry of food to the cities after he resigned from the Presidency amid the post-election crisis.

The former interim president Áñez, who has been in preventive detention for more than a year in prison in La Paz, is also accused of “sedition, terrorism, and conspiracy” in the framework of the case known as “coup d’état I” for the political and social crisis of 2019.

Last year the UN Committee against Torture (CAT) expressed its concern about how the crimes of sedition and terrorism have been applied in the country.

Similarly, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) that investigated the 2019 crisis in Bolivia observed the frequent use of both crimes for criminal prosecution.

With information from EFE