by Rod Hughes

Beware, all ye bureaucrats! A new Administrative Appeals Code is in being, thanks to a law that went into effect today, enabling citizens to challenge government action—or inaction–and the court will enforce it, if the judge agrees. And it applies to all governmental institutions right down to the municipal level and even autonomous ones such as universities are not exempt.

This new law replaces the inept 1966 regulations that were slow, costly in legal fees and severely limited the judge’ss power to redress citizen grievances.One of the judges who wrote the new legislation, Oscar Gonzalez, xulted, “We’ve reconstructed the whole thing, not with patchework or whitewash. We’ve torn down the old building and constructed it anew.”

First Chamber Judge Gonzalez has good reason for his enthusiam; this “out with the old, in with the new” approach has been long urged by reformers. Visionaries from President Oscar Arias on down have long advocated overhauling government institutions and laws that have been glued together with bits and pieces until they creak and totter.

Not all such efforts have been effective, however. The ill-conceived immigration law passed during the adnministration of President Abel Pacheco has never been implemented because it is deemed unworkable and probably unconstitutional as well. A new bill to supercede it is now on the well-heaped plate of congress.

Where the new appeal code differs from the writ of amparo that only appealed arbitrary action by government is that the citizen can force the bureaucracy to move to accomplish its duties. The Code’s innovative legal structure also allows use of oral arguments in place of the old, pondrous written petition and demurrer. This, hope those who drafted the legislation, will save time and keep the agenda from becoming clogged by a backlog of waiting cases.

But Judge Roberto Gutierrez warned that the Code is not a cureall. “There’s always a lack of preparation (of cases) and we’ll make errors and be mistaken,” he said, “But keeping in mind that we’re public servants who want to accellerate a solution to conflict between parties, we’re already winning the battle.”

The battle is one that ihas long been fought: Trying to make bureaurcrats and institutions more careful of how they treat their fellow citizens.