The term prevarication refers to the crime committed by a public official or a judicial authority by consciously dictating a resolution that is unjust . The notion can also be mentioned as prevarication , coming from the Latin word praevaricatio .
Prevarication appears when a ruling is arbitrary and is contrary to what is established by legislation . Whoever commits this offense commits an abuse of authority and does not comply with the obligations acquired within the framework of his or her powers.
It is important to remember that judges must be in charge of applying the law in specific cases, resorting to jurisdiction . He who, voluntarily, does not apply the law as it should, incurs the criminal offense called prevarication.
For malfeasance to exist, ultimately, the person responsible must be an official or authority who, while exercising his or her position, issues an unjust resolution with intent . The scope and limits of prevarication, however, depend on the laws of each nation.
Fraud is a concept that is used in the field of law to define the deliberate will to commit a criminal act while being aware of its illicit nature. In other words, we can say that it is the malice with which an individual proceeds to deceive another or ignore a previously contracted obligation. Fraud is one of the requirements of prevarication.
Suppose that a judge, in the context of a murder case, makes the decision to issue an arbitrary resolution, knowing that his ruling is unjust and contrary to the rules . Thus he ends up sentencing an innocent individual to prison. In a case of this type, the judge is responsible for the crime of prevarication.
Let's look at a real situation reflected by many Colombian media. Judges Fernando Castañeda and Félix María Galvis were sentenced to twenty years in prison and suspended for life after being found guilty of malfeasance and other crimes, committed by irregularly sanctioning the company Ecopetrol .
In each country, malfeasance is studied and condemned differently. In Argentina, for example, its Penal Code establishes the imposition of certain fines as well as absolute perpetual disqualification in cases in which the resolutions issued by the judges were contrary to the law or were based on resolutions or events unrelated to the truth. If to this were added the compromise of people's freedoms, that is, if there was condemnatory criminal conduct, imprisonment or confinement should be added to the disqualification.
It is important to note that judges are not the only ones who can be convicted of malfeasance, but in Argentina these penalties also affect lawyers. According to the Penal Code, the sanctions mentioned in the previous paragraph can reach six years for a judicial representative or lawyer who deliberately causes harm to the cause assigned to him. Likewise, any advisor, prosecutor and official who is in charge of issuing an opinion to the authorities and who participates in the malfeasance must be condemned.
It is alarming that the people in charge of administering justice can proceed in this way, exactly the opposite of what the system they represent repudiates. However, experiences such as those cited above remind us that our social organization is arbitrary: it may have positive points, giving rise to our growth as a species, but the fact that it exhibits such serious flaws shows that our existence is not subject to this structure. , but that we have built it, with our imperfections, and that in the same way we can modify it to live better and better.