The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court declared as unconstitutional the Special Law to Address the Crisis of Health, approved by the National Assembly last May 3, as read in Case No. 460. The aforementioned law opened the doors for international cooperation in health without the approval of the President of the Republic. The judges responded that this implies a transfer of part of the Sovereignty of the Venezuelan State to international organizations and donor countries, which could have the power to decide on which will consist such cooperation and what quality and compliance is given to the same, and the Executive national would be required to provide the necessary form to receive it in an imposed form from abroad, without having requested it.
The situation described could involve the compulsory receipt of medicinal products under investigation or in pre-commercial phase, or medicines that have been included in the list of substances that could affect health and banned from administration in humans, or products that could be manufactured in our territory and which, because of their free entry into our country, could affect the national economy, without the Government previously assessing whether they are necessary or not to address the supply situation that is wanted to solve, say the judges.
To illustrate this, the judges recalled that a situation such as described, happened in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948, when 1,300 people, including women and children, were deliberately infected with the viruses of syphilis and gonorrhea, in an experiment supported by the Ministry of Health of the United States, to study the effects of penicillin. «That led to President Barack Obama calling President Alvaro Colom (of Guatemala) to apologize «for making the population believe that what looked like a vaccine to study the effects of penicillin was actually an aggressive bacteria» as refers the Constitutional Chamber.
The Constitutional Court warned that the North-South cooperation «Can pose a great danger to the security, independence and sovereignty of nations, when it depends on standardized mechanisms to assess the behavior of Governments or which establish supranational control devices which unduly intervene on the social and economic policy of the country, imposing models or recipes based on political or economic interests of companies or Governments of generally developed countries. «
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