The Justice and Human Rights Committee of Peru's Chamber of Deputies approved a report recommending against granting legislative powers to the Executive branch in the areas it had requested, including penal and penitentiary matters, among others. The report passed with 11 votes in favor and four against.
Catherin Palomino, a member of Juntos por el Peru and president of the working group, presented the report to the committee. She said the main flaw identified in the request was a lack of delimitation in what the government of Keiko Fujimori had asked for.
According to the report, specialists consulted found that the request for powers was not sufficiently clear or delimited. The objections centered on how the Executive had framed the request, using broad terms that could open the door to excesses in how any resulting measures were applied. For that reason, the specialists concluded that the delegation should not be approved as the Executive had proposed it.
How the vote broke down
The votes in favor of the report came from the opposition bloc. Deputies from Ahora Nacion, Juntos por el Peru, Partido del Buen Gobierno and Obras backed the report, while lawmakers from Renovacion Popular and Fuerza Popular voted against it. This marks, in practice, the sixth rejection by a Chamber of Deputies committee of the request for delegated powers submitted by the government.
Peru's bicameral Congress
Peru's legislature was restructured into a bicameral system, restoring the Chamber of Deputies and a Senate after decades of a single-chamber Congress. Keiko Fujimori, the leader of the Fuerza Popular party and a long-time figure in Peruvian politics after three previous presidential campaigns, heads the government whose request for legislative powers has now been turned down by six committees in the lower chamber.
Sharp debate inside the committee
The report's approval followed a heated exchange inside the committee. Opposition deputies backed the objections laid out in the document, while some lawmakers aligned with the government pushed back against it.
Roxana Rocha, of Renovacion Popular, argued that there were areas in which powers could still be granted to the Executive. She said the committee's conclusion deserved closer review and called for a technical panel of specialists to be convened to provide more grounds for analysis. She cited the lawyer Edwin Siccha Perez, who had argued against rejecting the entire delegation outright, saying instead that some matters should be debated through the ordinary legislative process while others could be delegated to the Executive within clear limits set by Congress.
Rocha and Cesar Tito Rojas, of Juntos por el Peru, then proposed a recess to allow further debate on the matter. The proposal was never put to a vote, after the Juntos por el Peru deputy withdrew his request.
