Following president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s announcement that a bill to reform the Criminal Procedural Code will be sent to Congress yesterday, Cabinet Chief Jorge Capitanich defended the project saying it ‘has achieved a high level of consensus among jurists and scholars.” He also slammed opposition lawmakers and Clarín newspaper that have expressly rejected the project.
The chief of ministers praised the bill as a tool to guarantee “justice for all, full access to justice, celerity, oral proceedings, and efficiency.” Speaking at his daily press briefing at the government house, Capitanich rejected claims by the Clarín media group and opposition leaders that the reform seeks to void corruption probes and said such positions proved the “malicious intention of many media outlets to confuse citizens.”
The official expressed his “concern” regarding opposition parties role in Congress. “We are very concerned with the opposition parties’ role,” Capitanich stated. He accused opposition lawmakers of having shown a “manifestly anti-democratic behaviour” in the past and urged them to act coherently and to “quickly approve this bill which they have themselves been asking for.”
“I am all in favour of them freely expressing their ideas but I think that many of them have such an ‘opposition point of view’ that they simply cannot conceive these measures that truly contribute to the overall improvement of the (judicial) system,” Capitanich stated.
buenosairesherald.com