Definition of State of Exception

There are moments of tension or conflict that require the adoption of drastic measures to solve them, even skipping the law to make it. For this, governments have a series of legal instruments - a great paradox - that allow them to adapt to extreme circumstances. One of them is the state of exception.

The state of exception in matters of political law consists of suppressing certain freedoms and guarantees of citizens to control a situation of extreme risk.

Although in theory it should be used only in an extreme case to safeguard one's own population of some threat (of a natural type, an attack, a plague), in practice it has been used as an excuse to oppress the same population under a dictatorial regime.

During the state of emergency, the freedom of movement, assembly and expression of the citizens among others, and even make prohibitions that contravene acquired rights politically.

For example, to control an epidemic, a government may dictate a state of emergency and completely suppress freedom of movement. movements for days to prevent mass infections, as well as freedom of expression to avoid false rumors and poisoning of the

moral of the population.

Once again: the state of exception is a double-edged sword that can be used to overcome an adverse solution, or to elevate a dictatorship. Generally, the first thing a dictator does when overthrowing the previous government is to decree a state of exception to prevent his political enemies from taking power.

For this reason, on many occasions, the state of exception and the wide sleeve that this allows the authorities to suppress basic rights, is used to designate a group as an enemy.

In the case of dictatorships, these groups are democrats and political and social opponents, or minorities who are blamed for a certain situation or certain actions.

The oldest precedent of the state of exception that we can find is the Roman dictatorship.

To understand this institution, his name should be stripped of the pejorative connotation that it has today.

The Roman dictatorship was sanctioned by law, and it consisted in that in critical situations, all power was granted to a single magistrate (the dictator) for a short period of time (usually six months), during which his mandate was unrestricted as to what that he could do and, a posteriori, theoretically could not be held to account legally for any decision taken or action undertaken.

Among the dictators that Rome had before Sulla perverted the institution, Cincinnatus stands out, who was so twice, and both resigned to be in power more than strictly necessary once the problem is solved (only a few days), becoming for his compatriots an example of all kinds of virtues, such as honorability, frugality and honesty.

We also have Quinto Fabio Máximo, who served as the dictatorship during the Second Punic War, when Hannibal's forces threatened the Eternal City. Of course, a situation that currently fully justifies the state of emergency.

The legal articulation of what we currently know as a state of exception has been bequeathed to us by the Weimar Republic.

This entity politics, which replaced the German Empire and lasted in the interwar period until the advent of the Nazi regime, articulated a legal mechanism for limit freedoms and that the army and the forces of order could take power, spurred by a conservative social majority and who had terror to one revolution like the one that had happened in Russia in 1917.

In German it was called Ausnahmezustand.

Fotolia photos: Fiore26 / M-SUR

Issues in State of Exception