Here are some brief notes on the bill by legislator Juan Manuel Cid that modifies Law 10,326.
The international system of human rights incorporated with constitutional hierarchy (article 75 paragraph 22 of the Magna Carta) must be treated according to its status. From the analysis of the aforementioned bill, articles 5 and 6 –which modify articles 80 bis and 80 ter of Law 10,326, Citizen Coexistence Code– represent one of the many ineffective regulatory initiatives that restrict fundamental human rights, provided for in international treaties with constitutional hierarchy. Among them, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the National Constitution itself, article 14.
It is an initiative that criminalizes protected rights with a higher hierarchy, violating the most basic principles of human rights, such as progressiveness, rationality and non-regressiveness in compliance with regulatory adaptation commitments. Consequently, it is unconstitutional.
Although the provincial jurisdictions have the power to regulate the application of fundamental rights, they cannot do so by distorting the meaning and spirit of their function. And less reduce its scope.
The right to social protest was born as a consequence of the violation of another previous right, and was created or conquered thanks to the struggles of the labor movements (late XIX century onwards), as a tool for the defense of the working class in situations of oppression and exploitation.
Projects of this nature – which regulate the exercise of a fundamental right as an infringement – conceal the political impotence of influencing constitutional reform and that of conventional rights, and in an attempt to respond to the social order empower the punitive system, both by its competence and by the intervention of the police forces.
If we go deeper into the analysis, the project penalizes the non-notification of the protest. Actually, it does not mention that word, but rather the conduct accused is that of “those who organize demonstrations or public meetings that alter or interrupt the normal transit of the circulation routes of people and vehicles, without previously notifying the competent authority.”
It seems that if they give notice, the infraction would not exist, that is, the true behavior that this rule tries to sanction is not notifying the authorities. In that case, the jurisdictional route should be that of municipal jurisdiction and not the provincial one with the intervention of the security forces, as if it were crimes that alter that order: that of security.
It would be recommendable that the legislative chamber of Córdoba take into account the international human rights system and its jurisprudence, for which I recommend a publication in this regard by the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, called “Protest and human rights”.
* Director of the Human Rights Observatory of the Senate of the Nation