Separation of powers and the Ecuadorian Supreme Court: exploring presidential–judicial conflict in a post-transition democracy

Abstract

In 2005 ongoing political conflict between the executive and legislative branches of government in Ecuador culminated in a struggle over the judiciary. These events resulted in the dismissal, re-constitution, and dismissal again of the Ecuadorian high court (the Corte Suprema de Justicia) and the impeachment of the president. This paper uses the political crisis surrounding the dismissal of the Ecuadorian Supreme Court of Justice to examine the broader phenomenon of executive branch attacks on the judiciary in South American and Africa. We make three general observations: (1) the longevity of the judiciary alone (time without attack) does not guarantee a sufficiently deep reservoir of diffuse support to protect it from successful efforts at structural change or dissolution, (2) despite previous evidence that multilateral constitutional processes result in increased court independence (Dargent, 2009), we conclude that multi-party institutional arrangements are more vulnerable to the types of crisis that cause them to seek to use courts and their legitimacy to achieve political goals thereby limiting previous gains in independence, and (3) a court's institutional legitimacy is enhanced when it survives political threats from other branches of government. The crisis in Ecuador is used to demonstrate the challenges facing newer democracies with continuing multilateral conflict as well as the utility of thinking about how, why and when political institutions attack high courts and how the judiciary and citizens respond.