Weekly Report - 19 April 2005

A moment of reckoning has come for the supreme court recently enlarged and filled with new appointees by the slender pro-government majority in congress. Its actions will show whether fears voiced by the opposition at home and abroad about creeping authoritarianism enforced by a compliant judiciary are justified. The first important cases to come before the new supreme court have been inconclusive in this respect, but other controversial cases are on their way.