El abuso del estado de excepción en el Ecuador.

Abstract

The intention of this research is to analyze the legal nature of the state of emergency and its use within the Ecuadorian legal system. The state of emergency will observe the principles of temporality, necessity, legality, proportionality and territoriality; and in turn, grants the President the use of extraordinary powers to guarantee the return to a rule of law, whose objective is the temporary strengthening and in a specific geographical area, to a State Function. For its declaration, certain requirements must be met -which are verified by the Constitutional Court in a material and formal control-, of which in the present work the requirements of necessity and temporality will be highlighted. From January 2021 to December 2022, seventeen states of emergency were decreed and with this, it is shown how this mechanism, whose main characteristic is temporality and exceptionality, has been used in a manner improper to its legal nature and for that reason. this study was born. The Constitutional Court has determined that the state of emergency is not the appropriate measure nor is it designed to face the criminal crisis that the country is going through -since they are structural problems- and its use cannot and should not be used in an ordinary way. For these reasons, the legal problem focuses on examining whether there is an abuse of the principles of temporality and necessity in the declaration of states of emergency in the country.