Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa declares a new state of emergency: the two previous ones were invalidated

ANDEcuadorian President Daniel Noboa declared a state of emergency for the third time on Tuesday in part of the country’s territory, after the two previous declarations were revoked by the Constitutional Court, considering that the measure was not sufficiently argued.

This new state of exception for 60 days covers six provinces (Guayas, Los Ríos, Manabí, Orellana, Santa Elena and El Oro) and the municipality of Camilo Ponce Enríquez, a mining enclave in the southern Andean province of Azuay where the mayor was murdered in April and this week eight bodies with signs of torture were found in a mining concession.

In these territories, the measure contemplates the suspension of the rights of inviolability of the home, inviolability of correspondence and freedom of assembly, according to the decree, which extends for more than 50 pages to justify this declaration.

It also involves the mobilization of the Armed Forces and the National Police to carry out operations against organized crime gangs, which Noboa has declared “war” on since the beginning of the year by raising the fight against them to “internal armed conflict”, with which they have come to be classified as terrorist groups and belligerent non-state actors.

In a statement, the Ecuadorian Presidency stressed that on this occasion the state of emergency decree “has the support of the World Association of Jurists (WJA)”, in view of the analysis of the legality of the measure that the Constitutional Court will once again have to carry out.

On this occasion, the state of emergency decree establishes that the Constitutional Court may have access to secret reports from government authorities in case they need to review them to assess the relevance of the measure, without this implying their declassification and public access.

Court requests further justification

The Constitutional Court has validated the first state of emergency declared by Noboa at the beginning of the year and which was in force for 90 days throughout the country, issued following a spiral of violence by criminal gangs that included simultaneous riots in several prisons in the country with some 200 hostages and the takeover of the TC Televisión channel by a group of armed men during a live broadcast.

Noboa subsequently issued two targeted states of exception covering several provinces, but in both cases The Constitutional Court considered that “the facts mentioned in the decree do not specifically constitute the cause of internal armed conflict.”

The judges stressed that, for the most recent decree, the argument of the internal armed conflict “was the only (reason) invoked by the President of the Republic.”

“It should be noted that, due to its important legal implications, both the repeated jurisprudence of this Court and international law have established that in order for the cause of internal armed conflict to be established, two parameters must be considered that address the seriousness of the situation of violence,” the Court noted.

Between those two parameters cited by the court is “the level of organization of the armed group and the intensity of the hostilities.”

“However, the decree and the reports that support it do not mention any indications related to these parameters,” he concluded.

However, the Court clarified that “the finding that the declaration of a state of emergency does not meet the requirements set out in the Constitution does not imply a lack of recognition of the serious acts of violence and the complex circumstances that the country is experiencing.”

He also recalled that his decision does not affect the powers provided for in the ordinary legal system for the Executive to use the Armed Forces to fulfill its constitutional mission, since Ecuadorians approved by a large majority in a referendum held in April that the military support the police in operations against organised crime without the need to declare states of emergency.

Organized crime gangs, mainly dedicated to drug trafficking, are blamed for the wave of violence that is ravaging Ecuador and that has led it to be listed as the first country in Latin America in homicides per capitawith a rate of about 47.2 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, according to the Ecuadorian Observatory of Organized Crime (OECO).