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The battle over the Ministry of Health emails is far from over. This was made clear after Minister Enrique Paris rejected the formula for the authorization issued by the Seventh Court of Guarantee, which includes the mechanism presented by the Prosecutor’s Office to proceed with the seizure of these emails.
This procedure takes place within the framework of the investigation that the Prosecutor’s Office is carrying out against former Minister Jaime Mañalich and other authorities of the Health portfolio for the crime of spreading pathogenic germs, in the framework of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Along these lines, the struggle for the delivery of emails from the Ministry of Health – diligence requested by the Prosecutor’s Office and to which Minister Paris initially refused – was settled by a ruling of the Supreme Court in which it decided to grant partial access to emails.
However, in an eight-page brief entered into the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court, Paris requested an order not to innovate with the aim of suspending “the authorization granted by the Seventh Guarantee Court of Santiago on October 16, 2020, to carry out the entry, registration and seizure of all the emails already referred to “.
The resolution signed by Judge Patricio Álvarez accepted the formula presented by the Prosecutor’s Office to comply with the ruling of the highest court. Specifically, the Public Ministry may obtain “two forensic copies (copy A and copy B) of all the emails on which the measure falls.” This will be done through experts from the PDI’s Criminalistics and Cybercrime Laboratory and under the supervision of the Prosecutor’s Office.
The document establishes that the Prosecutor’s Office will keep copy A “as communications withheld (…) as a ‘witness copy’, under chain of custody and without being able to access it.” Meanwhile, copy B will be in the possession of the Ministry of Health, so within three days, Minister Paris will have to single out “electronic communications that correspond to the exceptions provided” by the highest court.
However, the Secretary of State considered that it is the duty of the Public Prosecutor’s Office “to identify the criminal acts reported, for example by search terms or descriptors, and thus comply with the requirement imposed by SSE, to make it possible to link such acts with the emails it intends to seize. “
The Armendariz replica
Paris’s onslaught met with a prompt response from regional prosecutor Xavier Armendariz, who in a two-page letter refuted the position of the Minsal head and asked to dismiss the request, which he even described as “useless.”
In the text cited by Third, the prosecutor assured that what the Minsal did was “discuss the scope of what should, ultimately, be seized to be incorporated into the investigative folder.” He added that “however, the procedure itself established by the 7th Guarantee Court has not been questioned.”
“The only reference in the Minsal presentation is in order to do a search by descriptors within the seized emails to detect which ones should be excluded,” he adds.
Later, he pointed out that “this suggestion, in addition to being impossible to comply with (what would be such descriptors?), Is simply useless since it is evident that it is the owner of the post office, the Minsal, who must propose who should be excluded and a mechanism is contemplated in the contested resolution to settle possible controversies that may arise from it. “
Finally, the persecutor argued that “some procedure must exist” to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Mañalich asks to declare as soon as possible
In another aspect of this controversy, after accusing the Prosecutor’s Office of “lynching” over the weekend, former Minister Jaime Mañalich went on the offensive and asked the courts to be summoned to testify.
In this way, the lawyers of former minister Gabriel Zaliasnik and César Ramos, requested the 7th and 3rd Guarantee Court of Santiago to summon a hearing so that the former minister could give a judicial statement “as soon as possible” in the complaints for Covid deaths -19 facing.
According to Zaliasnik told Emol, “it was necessary to exercise this right due to the reluctance of the prosecution to know the version of former minister Mañalich. We know that it is unusual, but when the Public Ministry does not want to hear versions or receive information that distorts the thesis of the Plaintiffs (Daniel) Jadue and (Alejandro) Navarro, there is nothing left but to go to court. “
The brief indicates that “in the course of four months, counted from the presentation of the first complaint, corresponding to the mayor, Mr. Daniel Jadue, the Public Ministry never had the initiative to summon my client to give a statement.”
According to the writings, “on the contrary, in relation to both causes, the existence of a repeated disclosure of imputative antecedents is observed, in the social media, thereby violating the relative secrecy of the investigative folder prescribed in the article 182 of the Criminal Procedure Code, affecting, consequently, the presumption of innocence of our client “.
“In this adverse context, this defense has requested Mr. Xavier Armendáriz, regional prosecutor of the North Central Metropolitan Prosecutor’s Office, on October 11, 2020, to summon our client, in order to testify (…) However , the Public Ministry has responded by summoning our client to give a statement on November 11, 2020, that is, one month after the presentation was made, “the letter adds.
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