Beyond the River: A Conversation with Luis Ramos Reyes, Magistrate in Exile

Abstract

Luis Ramos Reyes is a supreme magistrate of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in exile. He was appointed to office by the opposition-controlled National Assembly on July 21, 2017, following a plebiscite held five days earlier that—among other things—granted the body a mandate to make appointments to Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal of Justice (STJ). This adjudicative body is composed of 13 principle and 20 alternate magistrates, of which Ramos is among the latter.¹ The terms of the magistrates on the STJ at the time of the opposition’s appointments were set to expire in 2016 and as such, any vacancies should have been filled by the National Assembly in 2016. However, after the opposition’s victory in legislative elections on December 6, 2015, an emergency special session of the Chavista-controlled National Assembly was called during the Christmas recess to pack the STJ with loyalists. The opposition declared this act to be illegitimate and when it took power in 2016, it moved to oppose Nicolás Maduro’s corrupt consolidation of power across Venezuela’s institutions and to make its own parallel appointments. Of the 7.1 million citizens who voted in the 2017 plebiscite, approximately 98 percent voted to approve “the renewal of public authorities in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution.”² Luis Ramos Reyes and his fellow magistrates were appointed to that end. Maduro decried them as illegitimate and declared on state television that “they will all be put in jail, one after another.”³ Following a controversial opposition-boycotted election on July 30,⁴ a loyalist National Constituent Assembly convened and declared itself Venezuela’s supreme legislative body.⁵ Nearly all of the opposition-appointed magistrates fled the country and a loyalist STJ remains installed in Venezuela.