CONCURRING OPINION OF JUDGE EUGENIO RAÚL ZAFFARONI IN THE JUDGMENT OF AUGUST 27, 2020 OF THE INTER-AMERICAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS CASE OF URRUTIA LAUBREAUX V. CHILE 1. The sanction imposed on the judge in this case reveals the corporate significance that judges of collegiate bodies tried to assign to the Judiciary of which they formed part. It was argued, and not contested, that in the paper sent by the victim he criticized the conduct of the highest court during a dictatorship that committed gross human rights violations. 2. The law that authorized the sanction imposed on that occasion did not protect a mandate inherent in the judicial function, such as the prohibition of judges issuing irresponsible or undue public statements on proceedings in which they intervened or other similar proceedings. Rather, the law in question prohibited public criticism of other judges which, added to the ambiguity of the wording of the text, entailed prohibiting criticism of the very functioning of the Judiciary – and even criticism of the case law of other judges – without authorization from the highest authority. 3. In this case, the victim was sanctioned because he had criticized the highest authority owing to its conduct during a dictatorship under which execrable crimes against humanity were committed, even though he had not made his criticism public. 4. This signifies that the collegiate organs understood that members of the Judiciary lost the right of the citizen to criticize the exercise of the powers of the State and of the power of which they were members, even in a case of gross crimes against humanity, in order to protect a supposed honor, dignity or prestige of the entity to which they belonged. 5. Even though this is not stated, and it was not even considered in this way, the reality is that this kind of restriction involves the adoption of a corporate model that is valid for legal persons in the sphere of private law. Using an extreme simplification of the theory of the reality of legal persons – once used in common law – an anthropomorphic model is proposed in which the corporate human being is integrated as a cell of a hierarchized higher organism, under the command of a leadership that assumes the functions of a sort of guiding brain. This entity would, thus, be entitled to a different objective honor or prestige from the persons that compose it. 6. It is not necessary to define the corporate organization of a Judiciary in this way, when the rules that authorize sanctions – and the imposition of those sanctions – reveal that they respond to this underlying model where the judicial organization is conceived hierarchically and judges renounce the citizen’s right to criticize the decisions of their colleagues. 7. This hierarchized corporate organization corresponds to a vertical Judiciary, with no internal discussions, where freedom of thought and to criticize judges cedes before the collegiate bodies. 1