Sedition involves rising up against the current order.
Sedition , a term derived from the Latin sediĭo , is a group uprising against rulers, authorities, or the current order. Sedition is generally considered to be a movement or attitude that is less serious than a rebellion or revolution .
Promoting organizations that oppose authority, promoting resistance to power and making public speeches against the established order are some typical actions of sedition. These practices can be considered a crime depending on the context and legislation of each country.
In this way, it must be said that peaceful demonstrations, acts of protest and the exercise of political opposition are not usually considered acts of sedition or illegal actions in democratic regimes.
The sedition in Argentina
We can take the case of the Argentine Republic to understand what sedition is and at what point its actions are considered a crime. According to the Constitution of this South American country, the people govern through their representatives and the authorities established by the Magna Carta . People who attempt to claim the rights of citizens and make claims in their name, states the Argentine Constitution , incur the crime of sedition.
In this way, if members of the police force decide not to comply with the orders of political power until they are granted a salary increase, these people may be accused of sedition since they are not respecting what is established by the Constitution . In Argentina , convictions for sedition can lead to several years in prison .
The person responsible for promoting the attitudes and facts just described, corresponding to a situation that can be classified as sedition, is considered seditious , a word that can act as an adjective or as a noun, depending on the case.
Sedition is a crime.
Emergence of the concept
Regarding the term sedition, it can be said that in modernity it appeared for the first time around 1590 , during the reign of Elizabeth I.
Much earlier, however, it can already be seen in the Catholic Bible to refer to the action of promoting hostility towards constituted authority or the State through writing or words.
Sedition in the world
Sedition laws exist in countries such as the United States and Australia ; in the latter, it is part of an expansion of the sanctions and definitions of the anti-terrorist legislation that they carried out in December 2005. A known case of sedition took place in 1981 , when a Puerto Rican nationalist named Oscar López Rivera , who had fought in the war of Vietnam , received a sentence of 70 years in prison for having conspired in a seditious crime, among others.
López Rivera is among 16 individuals to whom Bill Clinton offered a conditional pardon in 1999; However, he did not accept it. According to his sister, the reason for his rejection was because he did not see the difference between being locked up and not being able to make full use of his freedom . The time this man spent in prison, 32 years, places him in the position of the political prisoner who has lasted the longest behind bars in the history of his country, but also worldwide.
In 2005, a Mexican woman was the focus of an investigation for seditious acts, after having written a letter to a local newspaper in which she negatively criticized the government. The American Civil Liberties Union was in charge of the case and got the accused exonerated of the charges. Colombia considers sedition as a crime that temporarily obstructs the current legal regime through the use of weapons, and contemplates the exclusion of the penalty as long as it does not entail acts of barbarism, ferocity or terrorism.