by tsukoui » Wed Apr 13, 2016 10:55 am
Surprising notification
Mónica López Baltodano, environmental lawyer and legal advisor to the farmers, stated that the notification received from the Parliamentary Secretary on Monday afternoon took them by surprise. Any modification or refusal of a citizens’ initiative is supposed to be communicated within 24 hours of its presentation. In this case, the notification should have arrived on Friday, April 8.
López Baltodano did not accept the rejection letter signed by Palacios, since it was dated Friday, April 8, and she insisted that they were notified this Monday, April 11. The legal representative termed the action “untimely”.
“We demanded that the first Secretary sign a letter with today’s date, and the hour in which we were being notified. Since they rejected that request, we said that we would not accept something with the incorrect date, in accordance with the law,” Baltodano stated upon leaving Parliament.
For the lawyer, the Secretary’s office of the Legislative Branch is being used to express a deliberate intention: “to tell the country that the Canal law has been written in stone, and that not even 28 thousand citizen signatures can modify it. It’s an aberration from the legal point of view, an egregious situation, and we’re going to go forward with the corresponding social mobilizations,” López Baltodano declared.