37 established competent authorities and the only change made was to keep him and the Minister of Labour from the temptation of intervening in the Conciliation Boards, since he had the power to do so. The Third Section of the Supreme Court was granted competence, since it is the highest pre-established authority in labour matters. As to the first draft bill that authorised the dismissal of those public servants who would have taken part in the conspiracy movement through the work stoppage, his greatest concern were the guarantees that they were going to be granted to revise their cases. Law 8, which gave the public employees of the INTEL and the IRHE the right to appear before the Conciliation and Decision Boards, was in force at that moment. The rest of public employees did not have that right. He feels that it was not a guarantee, since the Conciliation and Decision Board is not an autonomous organisation, but a part of the Ministry of Labour, and the Ministry of Labour has a lot of influence or could have a lot of influence on his decisions, and the President of the Republic, in turn, through the Minister of Labour, could have the temptation of handling such trials against the workers. It was of basic importance for the workers to arrive at the highest court of Panama on labour matters, which was the Third Section of the Supreme Court. It was also of basic importance to give them, in addition to the appropriate administrative remedies, which were those of reconsideration and appeal, an administrative conflicts labour cassation remedy as, in fact, was accomplished through Law 25. Numerous cases were reconsidered. Of his personal interest were some cases where he succeeded in having some staff members reinstated; in other cases he confirmed that there was guilt on the part of those dismissed, since they encouraged the general work stoppage that intended to accomplish a coup d’état. During his government nobody was ever dismissed for attending a public demonstration, but the cases that were examined for dismissal purposes were those of persons who promoted the stoppage. Those who went to the gates of the Ministries, of the governmental agencies, and tried to keep the workers from going to work, that is, those who performed specific physical acts to go on strike, were dismissed. He has no knowledge of which dismissals were made before the passing of Law 25. He wanted to wait for the entering into force of Law 25 to proceed with the dismissals, but there were cases, very few cases, that preceded Law 25, and he believes that Law 25 itself provided for such dismissals. On May 23, 1991 the Supreme Court of Panama declared the unconstitutionality of the “paragraph” of Article 2 of said Law, which empowered the Cabinet Council to determine whether the actions of the staff members were contrary to democracy and the constitutional order, in order to apply the dismissal sanctions. This provision, which was declared unconstitutional, was never used. Although for him the cited “paragraph” was constitutional, he always abided by the decision of the Supreme Court. The Prosecutorial Agency did not start formally an investigation against the members of the workers movement who took part in the organisation of the march and the work stoppage that coincided with the military uprising of colonel Eduardo Herrera-Hassán, despite the fact that the Government had proof that it was part of the same conspiracy. In Panama there is dismissal, which is a decision of the employer, and later the trial that relates to the dismissal, and there is the penal action as a separate thing. The practice in Panama is that after a justified dismissal there is no reason to pursue the worker and put him in jail. He withdrew his attention from the matter after the solving of the immediate problem of the possibility for these coups to continue successively. He had no interest in the permanence in jail of those dismissed workers who were no longer a major threat against democracy.