LA EROSIÓN DEL ESTADO DE DERECHO. Contribuciones y ensayos jurídicos

The Erosion of the Rule of Law is a compilation of twelve essays and legal contributions that the author has written in recent times under the rule of the Venezuelan Constitution of 1999. The thread that links most of these texts and that justifies its title, is precisely how the constitutional text has been manipulated and deformed from the institutions, to preserve its exercise against citizens' rights and even worse, bypassing and attacking fundamental guarantees that the Constitution enshrines to limit the exercise of power and to concretize the Federal State of democracy and the Rule of Law. The compiled essays and contributions show how the separation of public powers, a fundamental basement of constitutional democracy, has been affected to generate an unlimited supremacy of the Constitutional Chamber that ignores the limits of its functional competences established by the Constituent of 1999, as well as the excessive power that the executive branch exercises at will. Among the topics addressed we find as a basis the genesis of the rule of law forged at the dawn of the 1961 Constitution and the Pact of Punto Fijo; the irrational and unlimited empowerment of the President of the Republic to legislate through Decrees with the rank and force of law for long periods of time; the autonomous and denaturalized interpretation of the Constitution by the Constitutional Chamber, which by this means has become a constituent in permanent session; the promotion of reprehensible de facto ways by the public administration under cover of open legal texts; and as a remedy to the erosion of the rule of law, the issue of the restitution of constitutional integrity and its limits. It is relevant to insist that the collapse of the Rule of Law derives from a fundamental element, the absolute loss of the autonomy of the judiciary forged from the gross breach of the constitutional and legal norms that impose the professional and ethical conditions for the exercise of the magistracy that controls the legality and constitutionality of the acts of public power. This compilation, in short, aims to be a contribution against oblivion and a brushstroke to avoid relapsing into political and legal practices that led us to lose the most precious assets of free citizens, the rule of law and the integrity of the constitution.