Heriberto Araúz arrived at the Electoral Court in 2012, after sustaining the brazen thesis that a president could opt for re-election. He did not care that the Constitution expressly prohibited immediate re-election since his audience was reduced to one person: who just at that moment held the presidency and, at that time, was considering staying in it, Ricardo Martinelli.

The professor's outburst was his letter of introduction and he was rewarded with his designation as a member of the highest electoral body. It is tragic that the high price of his gratitude is paid by democracy and the rule of law. If Araúz cared little about the constitutional text before he won office, he will do it even less now that the benefactor of his accommodating criteria is in trouble. The text of his sentence is as devastating as the resonance he found in his partner, Judge Alfredo Juncá, that illustrious stranger whose merits to occupy the position were limited to the services that as "legal advisor" he provided to the deputies who they ratified him in office, the same jurist who a few months ago advocated the total elimination of electoral jurisdiction.

This is how the sentence was forged, one that finds neither logic nor any legal basis, and which already occupies a prominent place in the annals of ignominy. This couple has had to resort to the principle of specialty as a subterfuge to stretch the disastrous electoral jurisdiction, an issue that is beyond the powers of the electoral judge, which has already been rejected time and time again by the competent courts and by the United States. A ruling that throws 30 years of jurisprudence from the court itself into the garbage can. A bodrio that, as magistrate Eduardo Valdés rightly delimited in his rescue, intends to make an in-depth analysis of a principle that "is totally inadmissible in this instance and before this Court."

From the scissors of this pair of magistrates is the suit tailored to impunity, one of twisted logic and puny livelihood, to the shame of nationals and foreigners. With this action, the Electoral Court has done nothing but shield Ricardo Martinelli by preventing his trial.  - LA PRENSA, Mar. 25.