Statement Expressing Concern Over the Budgetary and Operational Dismantling of the Judiciary in Costa Rica

REPORT

STATEMENT EXPRESSING CONCERN OVER THE
BUDGETARY AND OPERATIONAL DISMANTLING OF
THE JUDICIARY IN COSTA RICA

The New York City Bar Association (“City Bar”)[1] expresses concern over the recent, severe budget cuts imposed by the Executive Branch of Costa Rica on the Judiciary, and over the institutional tension it has generated between branches of government. This statement is part of the City Bar’s broader concern regarding the weakening of judicial independence in Latin America[2], which has manifested through disciplinary reprisals, defamation campaigns, and threats against judges and, in Costa Rica’s case, through the financial strangulation of the body responsible for administering justice.[3] Budgetary autonomy is an essential guarantee of the Judiciary’s independence and material functioning: using resource allocation as leverage over the courts jeopardizes their daily operations, the thousands of cases and disputes that depend on them, and the legal certainty a country needs to prosper economically.[4]

This budget cut compounds a second, related crisis: the failure to appoint alternate justices to the Constitutional Chamber, which has left the Chamber unable to reach the quorum required to decide cases when sitting justices recuse themselves.[5] Both developments have been identified as part of a broader pattern of Executive pressure on judicial independence.[6] The sections below set out the facts underlying each and explain how, together, they contravene international standards that Costa Rica itself has recognized and incorporated into its legal system.

I. THE FACTS: A JUDICIARY-WIDE BUDGET CUT AND A BLOCKED CONSTITUTIONAL CHAMBER

The current administration, which took office on May 8, 2026, announced a cut of approximately ₱27,000 million colones (US$59,395,437.00) to the Judiciary’s budget.[7] The Costa Rican Association of the Judiciary (“ACOJUD”) has warned that the cut “compromises every citizen’s right to receive a timely, impartial, and effective response”[8] and would affect criminal investigations, victim assistance, public defense, and court operations nationwide.[9] The Judiciary’s Full Court (Corte Plena) raised the same concern at a particularly tense July 20 session devoted to the cut, at which a Justice warned that “the process of shutting down the Judiciary has already begun”[10] — a warning from the highest levels of the Judiciary that the City Bar believes deserves particular attention from the international community. That warning reflects a broader concern, shared by ACOJUD and echoed throughout the record described below, that the cut is not simply a reduction to one line item in the national budget, but a measure that reaches — and threatens — the Judiciary’s capacity to function as an independent branch of government.[11] The UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, Margaret Satterthwaite[12], and the Latin American Federation of Magistrates have likewise raised concerns, the latter urging that any budgetary decision affecting the Judiciary be adopted through transparent, technical institutional dialogue.[13]

The Constitutional Chamber — the chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice responsible for adjudicating constitutional matters, including habeas corpus(amparo) , and other actions concerning fundamental rights — faces a separate operational crisis due to the lack of alternate justices. By law, sitting justices must recuse themselves from certain cases due to disqualification, incapacity, or conflicts of interest, and without available alternates to replace them, the panel required to decide those cases cannot be constituted. The Chamber currently requires 12 alternates to function normally, but only 3 have been appointed[14], leaving cases affecting pensions, health, public employment, tax reform, and municipal issues unresolved.[15] Among the matters blocked by the resulting lack of quorum is the request to lift the immunity (“desafuero”) of former President Rodrigo Chaves over allegations of irregular financing of the 2022 electoral campaign[16] — a case that may itself help explain the Legislative Assembly’s failure to approve enough alternates.[17] On June 15, the Judiciary submitted a slate of 18 candidates for alternate positions, but the ruling party declined to endorse it, citing a lack of consensus, after having initially indicated it would review the list. While this impasse continues, the Judiciary and the Constitutional Chamber warn that the resulting backlog will keep growing, delaying rulings that affect thousands of people’s fundamental rights.[18]

II. THE PROTECTION OF JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE UNDER INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS

International human rights law recognizes that judicial independence is not limited to the formal guarantee that judges decide without external interference in each specific case. It also requires structural and institutional conditions that make the exercise of the judicial function possible. The United Nations Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary (1985), which Costa Rica itself recognizes and has incorporated into its legal system, articulate several of those conditions. Two are institutional. Principle 7 requires that each Member State [19] provide the judiciary with adequate resources — financial and human — to properly perform its functions; budgetary autonomy and adequate staffing are accordingly treated not as matters of administrative convenience, but as a structural guarantee of independence. Principle 1 [20] complements this by imposing on all government institutions, including the Executive Branch and the Legislative Assembly, an affirmative duty to respect and observe judicial independence — a duty that extends to how those branches exercise their own budgetary and appointment powers over the Judiciary.

Two others go to the exercise of the judicial function itself. Principle 2 [21] protects the judiciary from restrictions, improper influences, pressures, threats, or interference, direct or indirect, in deciding the matters before it. And Principle 10 [22] requires that any method of judicial selection and appointment — including the appointment of alternate justices — incorporate safeguards against improper motives and rest on merit, integrity, and professional ability.

The City Bar does not question the sovereign authority of states to determine reasonable budgetary allocations in light of competing public priorities. However, when the reduction, suspension, or withholding of judicial funding is used — whether by design or by practical effect — to pressure, destabilize, or weaken the courts, it ceases to be an ordinary exercise of fiscal policy and becomes a means of undermining judicial independence.  As the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers said: “[b]udget cuts affecting the Judiciary could compromise the functioning of the administration of justice, impacting investigations, trials, and other essential services during 2026 and the years that follow”.[23] This reduction takes place against a broader context of institutional polarization and pressure on the judiciary described throughout this statement. It bears emphasizing that the Basic Principles do not condition a violation of judicial independence on a showing of explicit intent to undermine it through budgetary cuts. Principle 7 recognizes adequate resources as a structural element of that independence precisely because courts cannot function independently without them, regardless of why funding is withheld. Measured against that standard, a reduction of this scale — affecting resources the Legislative Assembly had already approved for the Judiciary’s operations — has the practical effect of weakening that independence, regardless of the government’s justification for it.

Both the budget cut and the failure to appoint alternate justices to the Constitutional Chamber are difficult to reconcile with these standards, and each implicates several of the Basic Principles at once. The budget cut was announced, so far as the record reflects, without a clear technical or fiscal justification, which is difficult to square with the State’s obligation under Principle 7 to ensure the Judiciary the resources it needs to function. Because that cut was imposed unilaterally by the Executive Branch on a body whose own leadership has warned that it threatens to shut down the courts, it also calls into question whether the Executive is honoring its affirmative duty under Principle 1 to respect judicial independence, and, insofar as ACOJUD (the Costa Rican Association of the Judiciary) has described the measure as turning “the budget into an instrument of pressure”[24], it raises the kind of indirect interference with the exercise of the judicial function that Principle 2 is designed to prevent.

The operational crisis in the Constitutional Chamber implicates the same core standards, and one more. Without the alternate justices it needs to constitute a full panel, the Chamber lacks the minimum human resources Principle 7 requires. The Legislative Assembly’s decision not to endorse the slate the Judiciary submitted, after having initially indicated it would review it, is in tension with the Assembly’s own duty under Principle 1 to respect judicial independence and is difficult to reconcile with Principle 10’s requirement that appointment decisions rest on merit and integrity rather than on political convenience. And because the resulting lack of quorum leaves sensitive matters unresolved — including the request to lift former President Rodrigo Chaves’s immunity — the practical effect is functionally equivalent to the indirect interference with the Chamber’s adjudicative function that Principle 2 prohibits. Considered together with the quorum crisis in the Constitutional Chamber and the broader pattern described above, the budget cut is not an isolated fiscal dispute but a coordinated pressure on the Judiciary as an institution, implicating the core guarantees the Basic Principles are designed to protect.

III. THE CITY BAR URGES THE AUTHORITIES OF COSTA RICA TO PROTECT THE BUDGETARY AUTONOMY OF THE JUDICIARY AND TO ENSURE THE OPERATIONAL FUNCTIONING OF THE JUDICIARY

The City Bar urges the Executive Branch and the Legislative Assembly of Costa Rica to:

i. Refrain from using budgetary allocation as a mechanism of pressure against the Judiciary, in keeping with the United Nations Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary, applicable to the State of Costa Rica;

ii. Engage in transparent institutional dialogue with the judiciary to assess the Judiciary’s actual budgetary needs jointly and technically; and

iii. Establish or strengthen legal mechanisms guaranteeing a minimum, stable budgetary allocation to the Judiciary, subject to clear accountability mechanisms, so that the judiciary’s financial autonomy does not depend on discretionary budgetary decisions by other branches of government.

iv. Ensure the full functioning of the Constitutional Chamber by approving a sufficient number of suitable alternative justices.

The City Bar respectfully calls on regional and international bodies, including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, to monitor developments in this situation in Costa Rica.

Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice
Jaime Chávez Alor, Co-Executive Director
Cuitlahuac Castillo Camarena, Program Advisor for Institutional Integrity

Task Force on the Independence of Lawyers and Judges
Christopher Ferguson

August 2026