Writ of mandamus in Uruguay. Follow-up research

Abstract

The purpose of this publication is to adjunct a research, already published on Revista de Derecho n. 16 (July-December, 2017). In said research, it was made apparent that the vast majority of petitions for writs of mandamus were denied by the courts. This follow-up research aims to verify if said tendency remained unaltered and methodize the reasons given by the judges to deny the petitions, in order to, in the end, propose an amending act which intends to allow the writ of mandamus to achieve its intended purpose, that is, to be a remedy for cases where human rights are violated. So as to achieve that, all final decisions from a Civil Court of Appeals regarding a writ of mandamus petition between October 2018^th and September 2019^th were collected. Then, all decisions regarding “medical writs of mandamus” were discarded, as well as all petitions not aimed against the State. The decisions that were left, were then divided by its result and, finally, each was scrutinized on the reasons given by the court for its judgement. In total, three hundred and sixty decisions were issued, of which only twenty-two were “not medical writ of mandamus”. Twenty of them were rejected based on a strict interpretation of the requirements of the law N° 16.011, with no regards of the constitutional principles on the matter nor the hermeneutical rules in cases involving human rights.