The discussion regarding the criminal status of conduct in violation of curfew and quarantine under Covid-19 has turned heated in Chile. The Public Prosecutor's Office and the Public Defender's Office have maintained conflicting theses and the matter has ended up being of concern to Congress, who recently passed a law to "settle" the discussion (law no. 21,240 of June 20). The author offers herein a summary of the debate, critically reviews the substantive contents of the new law and offers specific proposals on how to interpret it (with case outlines). At the same time, the contribution sheds light on the functional value of the old and “denigrated” art. 318 of the Chilean Penal Code. In two words: the legislator undertakes a narrow perspective of the matter (the one focused on the citizens' conduct), rather than addressing the problem in its institutional dimension.
This paper critically analyses Law No. 21,240 of 20 June 2020, which introduced several reforms to Chile's Criminal Code in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Criticism focuses on issues related to the origin of the reform, but especially on the use of the criminal instrument as a panacea to solve complex social problems.
This paper addresses the problems that may be generated in relation to the principles of legality and immediacy in the event that the criminal oral hearing is arranged through remote connection platforms. This analysis is carried out taking as a reference the regulation contained in the Chilean Criminal Procedure Code. A second part (to be published) will deal with other related issues (principle of confrontation, control of evidence, communication between the accused and defence counsel, publicity and impact of the accused's agreement to hold this type of trial and the collision with the right to be tried within a reasonable time).
The bulletin considers the impact of Covid-19 on fundamental rights in important areas of daily life
The spread of Covid-19 poses a real and serious risk to people's health and lives. In view of this situation, it is appropriate to analyse the possibility of criminally charging the carrying out of a contagious conduct when its suitability to cause the death of a person has been demonstrated. This work contributes to the legal qualification of the contagion of a disease like Covid-19 for which it resorts to the development of the theory of objective imputation.
The text is a synthetic report of how the Chilean criminal justice system has reacted to the movement restrictions generated by the COVID pandemic. At first the problems were focused on giving continuity to the hearings on guarantees, especially those that affect people's freedom. Now the great challenge of the system is to verify the possibility of conducting oral trials, respecting the basic guarantees of due process
The article presents data about the spread of Coronavirus in federal and state prisons in the U.S. The first part of the article is dedicated to the Coronavirus spread among detainees, while the second data set gives information about contagions and deaths among prison staff. In the online version, you can choose to view the data for any state prison system and see how the numbers compare
Text originally published in Italian on Sistema Penale, 26th April 2020. Translated, with the authorization of Sistema Penale, by Fernando Londoño Martínez, associate professor at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile
The Trends in the Italian Constitutional Jurisprudence, in the Report by President Cartabia
With a recent law, the Portuguese legislator, in order to deal with the coronavirus emergency within the prison system, has adopted a pardon, together with other measures aimed at reducing the number of prisoners.