Law of Venezuela
Encyclopedia
The legal system of Venezuela
Venezuela
Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...

belongs to the Continental Law
Civil law (legal system)
Civil law is a legal system inspired by Roman law and whose primary feature is that laws are codified into collections, as compared to common law systems that gives great precedential weight to common law on the principle that it is unfair to treat similar facts differently on different...

 tradition. Venezuela was the first country in the world to abolish the death penalty
Capital punishment in Venezuela
Capital punishment is not applied in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Venezuela was the first country in the world to abolish the death penalty for all crimes, doing so by Constitution in 1863...

 for all crimes, doing so in 1863.

Public law

The basis for its public law
Public law
Public law is a theory of law governing the relationship between individuals and the state. Under this theory, constitutional law, administrative law and criminal law are sub-divisions of public law...

 is the 1999 Constitution
Constitution of Venezuela
||The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is the current and twenty-sixth constitution of Venezuela. It was drafted in mid-1999 by a constitutional assembly that had been created by popular referendum. Adopted in December 1999, it replaced the 1961 Constitution - the longest...

. The 1999 Constitution made significant changes to the separation of powers
Separation of powers
The separation of powers, often imprecisely used interchangeably with the trias politica principle, is a model for the governance of a state. The model was first developed in ancient Greece and came into widespread use by the Roman Republic as part of the unmodified Constitution of the Roman Republic...

. Instead of the usual three branches of government, the new Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has five:
  1. The executive branch (the Presidency).
  2. The legislative branch (the National Assembly of Venezuela
    National Assembly of Venezuela
    The National Assembly is the legislative branch of the Venezuelan government. It is a unicameral body made up of a variable number of members, who are elected by "universal, direct, personal, and secret" vote partly by direct election in state-based voting districts, and partly on a state-based...

    ).
  3. The judicial branch (the judiciary).
  4. The electoral branch (poder electoral, or "electoral power").
  5. The citizens' branch (poder ciudadano, or "citizens' power").

The electoral branch is headed by the National Electoral Council
National Electoral Council (Venezuela)
The National Electoral Council is one of the five independent branches of government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. It is the institution that oversees and guarantees the transparency of all elections and referendums in Venezuela at the local, regional, and national levels...

 (CNE) and is responsible for the independent oversight of all elections in the country, municipal, state, and federal. The citizens' branch is constituted by the (defensor del pueblo) (ombudsman
Ombudsman
An ombudsman is a person who acts as a trusted intermediary between an organization and some internal or external constituency while representing not only but mostly the broad scope of constituent interests...

 or "defender of the people"), the Chief Public Prosecutor
Prosecutor
The prosecutor is the chief legal representative of the prosecution in countries with either the common law adversarial system, or the civil law inquisitorial system...

 (fiscal general), and the comptroller general (contralor general). It is responsible for representing and defending the citizens in their dealings with powers of the Venezuelan state.

The judicial branch is headed by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice
Supreme Tribunal of Justice (Venezuela)
The Supreme Tribunal of Justice is the highest court of law in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and is the head of the judicial branch.The Supreme Tribunal may meet either in specialized chambers or in plenary session...

, whose 32 justices ("magistrados") are elected by the National Assembly for a single 12-year term.

Criminal Law

Until 1998 Venezuelan criminal law was governed by the Código de Enjuiciamiento Criminal of 1926. The 1926 procedures "followed many of the traditional rules of inquisitorial tradition", with the pretrial process substantially under the judge's control. At the initial sumario step a judge would direct the police investigation; and after apprehension by police, the judge had 72 hours to decide whether to keep suspects in detention. At the second plenario step the process became more adversarial and documents of process made available to the defendant, but the judge still had "wide discretion to pursue charges beyond those outlined in the accusation". The 1926 code was established by the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez
Juan Vicente Gómez
Juan Vicente Gómez Chacón was a military general and de facto ruler of Venezuela from 1908 until his death in 1935. He was president on three occasions during this time, and ruled as an unelected military strongman for the rest of the era.-Early years:Gómez was a barely literate cattle herder and...

, and represented a substantial change from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century procedures, where Venezuela had jury trials and oral procedures in some states. Gómez standardised legal procedures and suppressed juries.

In July 1998 Venezuela's criminal law was radically reformed, with the replacement of the 1926 code with the Código Orgánico Procesal Penal. The old secret sumario phase was abolished, and defendants had the immediate right to a lawyer on arrest or indictment. The indictment and police investigation process was now controlled by prosecutors rather than judges, and suspects had to be charged within 24 hours. For more serious crimes, jurors would be involved. Plea bargaining was accepted, and in some cases defendants could avoid punishment by making restitution to their victims. However, the radical package of reforms, partly inspired by Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

's "liberal code, low crime, and notably small incarcerated population" ignored the dominant Venezuelan culture "in which the only conceivable form of punishment is prison or corporal punishment".

Within a year of the new criminal code, commissions had been formed to consider revising it. The first reform, in March 2000, among other changes reinstated the old 72-hour time limit for judicial decision on imprisonment. The reform was presented as "a necessary defense of society from criminality, implying that the new code was ill-adapted to Venezuelan society and overly lenient toward criminals." Further changes in November 2001 made a substantial number of changes which "left very little of the original spirit of the 1998 code". Jury trials were abolished, and among changes prosecutors were given six months to proceed with trial or drop charges. In 1999 - 2001 a high proportion of jury trials had been postponed, as a range of problems with the new jury approach remained to be addressed. However other delays were more significant contributors to postponement. Whilst the number of criminal judges more than doubled from 1998 to 2004, the number of prosecutors did not substantially increase, despite the increased importance of this office in the legal system. The Venezuelan Fiscal General estimated 2900 cases per prosecutor in 2004, rising to 4000 in 2006.
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