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<h1 id="reader-title">Venezuela’s Supreme Court Strikes a Blow
to the Impunity of Liberal Terror</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">By LUCAS KOERNER, April
22nd 2016</div>
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<p>Last week, the Venezuelan Supreme Court <a
target="_blank"
href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11926">blocked</a> the
extremely controversial Amnesty Law passed by the
country's opposition-controlled legislature, which would
have pardoned scores of right-wing leaders convicted of
violent political crimes.</p>
<p>The bill is applicable to all manner of felonies and
misdemeanors committed since January 1, 1999,
including “damage to the national electrical system”,
“violence or resistance to authority” and
even “conspiracy and terrorism”, provided that these
crimes were perpetrated in the course of
“demonstrations, protests, or meetings for political
purposes”.</p>
<p>The opposition's Amnesty Law even goes as far as to
list specific incidents that qualify for amnesty,
ranging chronologically from the 2002 US-sponsored coup
to the 2014 violent opposition protests known as
guarimbas.</p>
<p>In short, the law amounts to a hand-written <a
target="_blank"
href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11887">confession</a> of
seventeen years of right-wing terror aimed at
overthrowing the country’s democratically-elected
Chavista government. </p>
<p>According to the high court, the legislation would
enact a “scandalous impunity to the detriment of public
morals, subverting the ethical and juridical order of
the country”.</p>
<p>Despite the entirely reasonable character of
this objection, the ruling was nonetheless derided as
yet more evidence of Venezuela’s authoritarian collapse
by of the self-anointed ideological guard-dogs of
liberal democracy. </p>
<p><strong>Western Apologia for Political Violence</strong></p>
<p>On Thursday, Human Rights Watch Americas Director José
Miguel Vivanco <a target="_blank"
href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/04/14/upholding-abuse-venezuela">accused</a> the
top tribunal of “upholding abuse” in sanctioning the
criminal prosecution of opposition leaders for
“legitimate political activities”. </p>
<p>Given HRW’s <a target="_blank"
href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10301">highly
dubious track record</a> on Venezuela, it is
unsurprising that they would categorize as “legitimate”
universally outlawed offenses such as “individual
terrorism”,<em> “</em>use of minors to commit crimes”,
and “mutiny, civil rebellion, treason, military
rebellion”.</p>
<p>In regurgitating the law’s perverse logic that these
felonies merit amnesty since they were committed with
“political purposes”, HRW’s alleged human rights
advocacy begins to look more and more like a naked
apology for anti-government political violence in
Venezuela.</p>
<p>Even more predictable was the response of the <em>Washington
Post</em>– the mouthpiece of the US neoconservative
establishment– which in a recent <a target="_blank"
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/venezuela-is-in-desperate-need-of-a-political-intervention/2016/04/12/d7071d98-00c9-11e6-9203-7b8670959b88_story.html">editorial</a> cited
the Supreme Court ruling in its case for “political
intervention” in Venezuela as if US imperial
interference in the South American country’s internal
affairs was not a <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/US-Aggression-Against-Venezuela-Fact-Not-Fiction-20150225-0036.html">long
established practice</a> over the last 17 years of
leftwing Chavista governance.</p>
<p>Of course, the Western interventionist chorus would be
incomplete without the US State Department weighing in
on the matter. </p>
<p>In the lead-up to the parliamentary vote on the bill,
Undersecretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs
Roberta Jacobson <a target="_blank"
href="https://twitter.com/WHAAsstSecty/status/717741738828423168">met</a> with
Lilian Tintori, the wife of jailed far right politician
Leopoldo Lopez, issuing a call for the “immediate
release” of those she termed “political prisoners”. </p>
<p>Absent from her statement was any mention of the fact
that Lopez was formally <a target="_blank"
href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11502">convicted</a> of
leading 2014’s violent anti-government protests known as
“the exit”, which resulted in 43 dead and hundreds
injured, the <a target="_blank"
href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10580">majority</a> of
whom passerby and state security personnel. </p>
<p><strong>An Excess of Judicial Independence?</strong></p>
<p>Following the ruling, the US State Department released
its 2015 human rights report in which the body sharply <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/humanrightsreport/#wrapper">castigated</a> Venezuela
for its alleged “lack” of judicial independence as well
as its “use of the judiciary to intimidate and
selectively prosecute government critics”.</p>
<p>For a moment, let’s bracket the obscene hypocrisy of
these accusations coming from a country that has
produced such shining examples of judicial independence
such as <em>Bush v. Gore</em> and <em>Citizens’ United </em>and
whose judiciary has gone to incredible lengths to
guarantee due process to political prisoners such as
Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu Jamal, and Oscar López
Rivera.</p>
<div class="adL">
<p>Let us be clear: Washington’s problem with the
Venezuelan Supreme Court is not its lack of
independence, but rather that it is <em>too </em>independent
from the country’s neo-colonial oligarchy that it
refuses to follow their dictates. </p>
<p>Prior to Chávez, a man of the <a target="_blank"
href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11508">aristocratic</a> stature
such as Leopoldo López– the Harvard-educated <a
target="_blank"
href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11452">son</a> of
one of Venezuela’s wealthiest families– would never
face conviction for his crimes, which include publicly
inciting the violent ouster of the
democratically-elected government. </p>
<p>In the eyes of the West, what is thus intolerable
about the Supreme Court decision to strike down the
Amnesty Law and uphold the conviction of López and
dozens of others is not its supposed violation of the
rule of law, but its full application against the most
powerful elements of Venezuelan society.</p>
<p><strong>Against Liberalism</strong></p>
<p>In a word, the mortal sin of Venezuela’s judiciary
was to defy the hegemonic ideology of liberal
democracy for whom equality before the law is treated
as a mere formalism that is professed but never
practiced.</p>
<p>In this regard, the Venezuelan Constitution states
that, “The law will guarantee the juridical and
administrative conditions so that equality before the
law is real and effective…it will especially protect
those persons… who find themselves in circumstances of
clear weakness and will punish the abuses and
mistreatment committed against them.”</p>
<p>This conception of legal equality as a radical
defense of the weak and oppressed openly clashes with
the liberalism enshrined in the US Constitution in
which the principle of “equal protection of the laws”
codified in the 14<sup>th</sup> Amendment is formal in
character, lending itself to appropriation by
corporations who secured the right to personhood long
before African-Americans.</p>
<p>Within this framework, the Venezuelan Supreme Court
found that the Amnesty Law is unconstitutional
primarily because it amounts to a sanctioning of
“contempt for the life, integrity, and dignity of…
those harmed by the amnestied acts, affecting their
right to access justice.”</p>
<p>That is, the high court ruled that the rights of the
victims of right-wing terror– mostly black, brown, and
poor– take precedence over the privileges of the
perpetrators, much to the outrage of the Venezuelan
oligarchy and its US imperial masters.</p>
<p>What is at stake here is not some local politicized
skirmish over separation of powers but a profoundly
universal ethical dispute over what kind of world we
want to live in: one in which the normative order
guarantees the life and human dignity of the
oppressed, or alternatively one in which their
oppressors are given carte blanche to murder and
terrorize.</p>
<p> Venezuela’s Supreme Court has been crucified by the
powers at be for unacceptably choosing the former.</p>
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