Pnma: No more USAID for the courts

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has reassigned aid money previously destined for the Panamanian courts to other, non-governmental legal reform efforts. According to a US Embassy source, this move was made because the aid program --- most of whose funds for this fiscal year have already been spent --- had certain conditions attached that had been agreed when Adán Arnulfo Arjona was the Supreme Court’s presiding magistrate, but after César Pereira Burgos succeeded Arjona he would not agree to those conditions and subsequent negotiations between Pereira and USAID proved fruitless.

The Americans are helping Panama computerize their court docketing, providing hardware, software and training programs to do so. But the US is also interested in procedural reforms that would allow cases without merit to be more easily dismissed and oral testimony in open court rather than time-consuming pretrial prosecutorial interrogations with the subsequent reading of non-verbatim transcripts at trial. Pereira, according the embassy source, has “philosophical” objections to the latter suggestions, which he considers to be an attempt to impose the Anglo-American Common Law system on Panamanian justice.