Habeas corpus is a legal institution.
The concept of habeas corpus identifies the right that every citizen who is detained and waiting to appear immediately and publicly before a court or authority has. Judges, upon hearing the detainee's testimony, determine whether the arrest is legal or illegal and, therefore, can order it to end.
Habeas corpus, therefore, constitutes a legal institution that seeks to avoid arbitrary arrests and that guarantees the personal freedom of the individual. The resource is usually used to prevent abuses by the authorities since it requires the detainee 's situation to be made known to a judge .
Origin of habeas corpus
Experts say that habeas corpus dates back to Roman times, when its objective was to exhibit the free man who was detained by another person. This legal tool, therefore, was focused on cases in which freedom among citizens was violated and not against decisions of the rulers.
The use of recourse against the authorities began to be applied in 1305 , when King Edward I of England was required to report the situation of a subject with restricted freedom .
Habeas corpus means that no person can be detained arbitrarily.
Individual freedom and personal integrity
Specialists highlight that habeas corpus defends and covers two important rights: individual freedom (which means that the individual cannot be detained arbitrarily) and personal integrity (the subject must not be a victim of damage to his or her person, such as injuries. generated by torture, for example).
Organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch defend the establishment of the right of habeas corpus worldwide to prevent any type of violation.
The purposes of habeas corpus
Regarding the social , political and legal sphere, possibly one of the most mentioned terms and at the same time with the greatest number of meanings is freedom . In the concept of habeas corpus, it is also one of the most present words and it is a faculty or perhaps human capacity to act in one way or another, being faithful to what the person believes appropriate.
This means that freedom is a space where there are no external constraints or impediments to the complete development of an individual; An act that is executed with absolute control of the faculties by an individual is a fact conceived in freedom.
But it is not a concept that should be understood only in an individual sense; It is also a social and political issue. In this way, a person's actions are judged according to the laws and the legal context in which they are carried out.
A constitutional guarantee
Habeas corpus is one of the guarantees that regulates the fundamental rights of an individual and depends on a constitutional mandate. That is to say, any person who is deprived of his or her freedom or who feels that his or her individual security is threatened can request a writ of habeas corpus from a judge with jurisdiction in the area in question through which his or her freedom is restored.
It is important, before finishing, to make it clear that habeas corpus is not a procedure, but a process . Its purpose is to ensure the freedom of a person and the resolutions taken from it respond to this requirement.
The purposes of habeas corpus are:
* Preventive purpose : any person who may see their freedom illegally threatened has the right to request that the factor that intimidates them be examined;
* Reparatory purpose : the person who is illegally deprived of his freedom can request rectification of the case in which he is involved and the judge must restore his freedom;
* Generic purpose : responds to those circumstances that are not contemplated in the previous purposes and the affected person may request rectification of their case if they have been deprived of their freedom or security in illegal ways.