Excepcionalidad permanente: estados de excepción y legalidad penal en Ecuador. Una crítica al control constitucional (2021–2025).

Abstract

The purpose of this academic essay is to understand how the repeated declaration of states of emergency in Ecuador (2021-2025) has transformed an extraordinary mechanism into a governmental practice and a criminal policy with implications for the scope and limits of state power and its punitive dimensions. The main question is whether this has been detrimental to the principle of legality and the fundamental pillars of the rule of law, as well as whether there has been any constitutional oversight or a legitimization of punitivism disguised under the guise of constitutionalism. The objective is to analyze the impacts of this phenomenon on criminal law and the state of organized criminal law regarding the constitutional limits of the state's response. The methodology integrates bibliographic, doctrinal, jurisprudential, critical, and empirical hermeneutics, in which the author uses an empirical matrix composed of controversial decisions on the control of states of emergency, executive decrees, and laws regulating the matter. It is concluded that the exception has lost its extraordinary character, that the criminal rule of law has been violated through tolerated practices and restrictions ordered by the State, that the Constitutional Court has not carried out rigorous control and that there is a consolidated framework of high-intensity political-criminal premises with low guarantee density.