|
|
| Javier
Couso (left) and former President of Chile Eduardo
Frei (right) |
The
purpose
of my travel to Chile this Summer was to complete the
field work for my dissertation project on the emergence
of Judicial Politics in Chile. Specifically, I needed
to complete interviews with the members of Chile's Constitutional
Court that I had not been able to interview the previous
Summer. Also, I wanted to try to interview former President
Eduardo Frei, who had just completed his presidential
mandate on March.
The
interviews were a critical component on my dissertation
project, because the insight from the very actors
of the incipient process of judicialization of politics
in Chile can only be traced by getting the actors
involved to speak about their impressions on the
legitimacy of constitutional judicial review, the
political role of the Constitutional Court, and the
impact that this new institution plays in the political
scene. The need to conduct in-depth interviews was
particularly important in order to get the opinion
of the Justices of Chile's Constitutional Court,
because in Chile the members of this court almost
never make public statements or give interviews to
the news media. An additional goal of my trip to
Chile was to collect the judicial decisions of the
year 1999-2000. Because these decisions are not publish
in a very systematic way, it is impossible to get
them from abroad.
I
am happy to report that the goals of my field trip
were all fulfilled. I interviewed the members of
the Constitutional Court whom I had not been able
to interview in my previous field trip. I also had
a one hour meeting with former President Eduardo
Frei, who was very open and candid about his impressions
on the role played by the Constitutional Court and
the strategies that his government had to devise
in order to deal with this new political actor. The
insight provided by President Frei was invaluable
for my project, especially because there is no record
of the executive power's reaction to the existence
of a court that could veto government sponsored legislation.
|
|
| Javier
Couso (left) and Juan Colombo Cambell (right),
the President of Chile's Constitutional Court. |
The
trip to Chile also provided me with the opportunity
to follow-up on the judicial decisions made by the
Constitutional Court over the last year. I also took
advantage of the travel to get the insight from jurist
and law-professors who specialized on Constitutional
politics. Particularly important was the interview
I got with President Lagos' main constitutional advisor,
Mr. Carlos Carmona, who heads a special unit created
by president Aylwin in 1990 to deal with the Constitutional
Court.
I
am currently in the lasts stages of my dissertation.
Before this trip to Chile, I already had a pretty
clear idea of what was the 'politics' of constitutional
review in Chile. This last trip to Chile not only
was useful in order to complete the interviews, but
especially to test my analysis of what has happened
with judicial politics in Chile. Indeed, the possibility
to go back to terrain at the final stages of the
dissertation has benefits I did not anticipate.
Javier
Couso is a PhD candidate in the Jurisprudence and
Social Policy program
