Panama justice system overwhelmed by high profile cases

Trials in high-profile processes in Panama are a constant in 2023 where cases such as New Business, Lava Jato  Odebrecht, and the follow-up to a former mayor of the capital city challenged the Panamanian justice system and its capacity to handle these large-scale cases reports TVN.

According to the lawyer Rodrigo Noriega, from the moment Panama recovered its democracy, no judicial reform has been carried out and the resources have not been provided to the Judiciary and the Public Ministry to carry out the reform.

“During the administration from 2014 to 2019, the judicial system was overloaded with all these high-profile investigations. It is showing that there was no Parallel Prosecutor’s Office and that many of these cases were well founded,” said Noriega.

He added that when the investigations were carried out in the Odebrecht case, there was only one investigator from the Judicial Investigation Directorate (DIJ) assigned full-time for systemic issues because, according to Moreno, the entity did not have great capacity.

“Why was the Blue Apple case postponed? Because here in Panama we only have two liquidating judges in the Judicial Branch. After that, the mixed inquisitive system is closed, which should take place in 2024 or 2025. For this reason, all cases end up competing for judicial time,” he said.

Regarding the delay in ruling on the New Business case, Noriega stressed that this is a file of 88,000 pages, so preparing the ruling on the case is not easy and that the judge must carefully verify each page since the ruling must be sustained on these sheets, despite having assistants.

“In my opinion, I would be waiting for the ruling on this case in the next few days,” he said.