USAID CUTS AID TO PANAMANIAN COURTS

From the article "Aid pipeline to RP courts runs dry
" (Via CaribPundit):

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has reassigned aid money previously destined for the Panamanian courts to other, non-governmental legal reform efforts. According to a US Embassy source, this move was made because the aid program --- most of whose funds for this fiscal year have already been spent --- had certain conditions attached that had been agreed when Adán Arnulfo Arjona was the Supreme Court’s presiding magistrate, but after César Pereira Burgos succeeded Arjona he would not agree to those conditions and subsequent negotiations between Pereira and USAID proved fruitless.

[T]he US is also interested in procedural reforms that would allow cases without merit to be more easily dismissed and oral testimony in open court rather than time-consuming pretrial prosecutorial interrogations with the subsequent reading of non-verbatim transcripts at trial. Pereira, according the embassy source, has “philosophical” objections to the latter suggestions, which he considers to be an attempt to impose the Anglo-American Common Law system on Panamanian justice.

. . .According to law professor and radio talk show host Miguel Antonio Bernal, there is a combined effort by the various international aid donors to Panama courts --- including the European Union (EU) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) --- to apply economic pressure against this country’s court system. The causes, according to Bernal, are multiple and complex, including intra-judicial and intra-governmental power struggles and the Panamanian judiciary’s sordid reputation for corruption. However, Bernal alleged, the last straw appears to have been an attempt by Foreign Minister Harmodio Arias Cerjak to appoint a Mireyista to take charge of all foreign aid coming to the Panamanian courts, notwithstanding that faction’s severe defeat in the recent elections.