Weekly Report - 13 December 2012 (WR-12-49)

Soldiers surrounded the national congress in Tegucigalpa on 11 December and well into the small hours of the next day. Inside a decisive majority of legislators voted to dismiss four supreme court (CSJ) magistrates who had ruled two weeks earlier that a law designed to purge the police of corrupt elements was unconstitutional. In so doing congress, with the tacit approval of President Porfirio Lobo, flouted the constitution which nowhere confers upon it the power to dismiss CSJ magistrates. Unravelling the twisted skein of Honduran politics suggests that there was far more at play than just this law, and that the inter-institutional tension which resulted in the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya in June 2009 remains unresolved.

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