International Court of Justice claims joining the two cases will speed up resolution to the pending border dispute.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) this week decided to join the two cases concerning the border dispute between Nicaragua and Costa Rica “in conformity with the principle of the sound administration of justice and with the need for judicial economy,” according to statement released by the World Court.

The first case, filed by Costa Rica in November 2010, was referred to a “Certain Activities carried out by Nicaragua in the Border Area.” That case was based on Costa Rica’s claim of “incursion into, occupation of and use by Nicaragua’s army of Costa Rican territory” in connection with Nicaragua’s river-dredging efforts, which Costa Rica likened to “the construction of a canal across Costa Rican territory.”

The second case, instituted by Nicaragua in 2011, was called “Construction of a Road in Costa Rica along the San Juan River.” That proceeding was based on Nicaragua’s claim of “violations of Nicaraguan sovereignty and major environmental damages on its territory” caused by Costa Rica’s construction of Route 1856—the riverside highway paralleling Nicaragua’s San Juan River.

The two proceedings will now be joined into one case at the request of Nicaragua. Costa Rica had rejected the joinder, argued that merging the two cases “would neither be timely nor equitable” because there is “no close connection between the two cases.” The Court disagrees.

“The Court is of the opinion that a decision to join the proceedings will allow the Court to address simultaneously the totality of the various interrelated and contested issues raised by the Parties, including any questions of fact or law that are common to the disputes presented,” the ICJ said in a statement published Tuesday afternoon. “In the view of the Court, hearing and deciding the two cases together will have significant advantages.”
Costa Rica reacts

The government of Costa Rica reacted to the Court’s decision on Tuesday evening with a press release celebrating ICJ’s alleged decision to also reject four counter-claims filed by Nicaragua last year. Nicaragua, in a letter to the Court last August, petitioned for inclusion of counter-claims seeking navigation rights to Costa Rica’s Colorado River and demanding an injunction to halt construction on Costa Rica’s riverside highway, which Nicaragua claims is causing irreversible damage to the Río San Juan and surrounding ecosystem.

Nicaragua argues that 90% of its waters from the Río San Juan are diverted into Costa Rica’s Río Colorado, so Nicaragua should be allowed to have free navigation rights to the Tico waterway in a quid pro quo for Costa Rica’s right to navigate the Río San Juan. Costa Rica, however, scoffed at Nicaragua’s courter-claim as a form of “expansionism.”

“We could respond to that with our own counter-claim demanding Costa Rica’s right to navigate Lake Nicaragua,” Costa Rican Foreign Minister Enrique Castillo told The Nicaragua Dispatch in February.

Still, it’s not clear where Costa Rica is getting its information that the ICJ has rejected Nicaragua’s counter-claims. The ICJ’s release on Tuesday references the four counter-claims by Nicaragua, but does not say that they were rejected by the Court.

The Nicaraguan government, meanwhile, has not yet responded to the ICJ decision.

By Tim Rogers / Nicaragua Dispatch

The quote of the day Tuesday, maybe of the year, the decade…of all time:  “Demandaré a una periodista y a las personas que mancharon mi imagen con el tema de la concesión a la empresa brasileña OAS”.

Translation: “I am going to sue a journalist and everyone who has tarnished my image with respect to the OAS concession“.

Source: CRHOY.com

An earthquake registering 4.7 on the Richter Scale was felt this morning in Matina, Limón. The Observatorio Vulcanológico y Sismológico de Costa Rica, (OVSICORI) reports the epicentre located 2 kms southeast of Matina.

The quake had a depth of of 17kms and caused by a local fault.

The quake was reported felt in various communities in Limón, Turrialba, Cartago and Pérez Zeledón.

It’s been some time since we’ve seen the “yellow wave” (ICE employees typically dressed in yellow t-shirts) hit the streets in protest for something or other. This time, workers of the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE) are protesting the number portability issue.

The ICE workers union said that the state telecom employees will walk off the job next Monday.

Number portability allows cellular phone customers to switch carier and keep their phone number. Fabio Chaves, head of the workers union, said that the portability is happening to fast in Costa Rica, some 18 months, when it takes some 10 years in other countries.

Another point of contention is that number portability in Costa Rica will be free to the consumer, the carriers footing the bill every time a customer wants to make a switch. In most countries the consumer is charged a fee for any change in carrier, according to Chaves.

Other issues on the protest agenda are an electricity bill currently before Legislators and the practice of political appointments in top posts at ICE.

A scam directed apparently against the cell phone service provider Claro has caught some of its customers with blocked phones. La Nacion reported the case of Jessica Zamora who bought her phone several months ago and found it useless recently.

When she tried to check back with the store that sold it to her, she found it closed. Claro officials say an individual bought 1,000 phones for resale but did not keep up the payments, so the phones were blocked.

Edgar del Valle of Claro’s legal department said that the individual had represented himself as buying the phone in a bloc for a corporation. But instead, he sold them to customers at stores.

The blocking of the phones was all per contract if the “corporation” did not keep up its payments, which happened. The lawyers says that the company was astounded when they cut off service to find that they had stuck their foot into a public relations bear trap.

Eduardo Castellon of the regulating agency SUTEL says there is nothing his agency can do for irate customers because the scam was directed at Claro.  He says customers should have verified the origin of the phones.

The best he could suggest was that customers file a criminal complaint through the courts. (Another alternative is to file with Consumer Protection from the Economy Ministry.)

But it is unlikely that the customers would know the name of the fraud artist since the phones were sold in stores. It is unreasonable that buyers from a fixed outlet would play detective. They had every reason to believe the phones were legitimate.

Del Valle suggests that the affected customers go to a licensed Claro store and take out a plan with the company to get their phones switched on. But he defended the company’s right to block the service because the phones belong to Claro.

Commentary: Frankly, the attitude of both SUTEL and Claro makes no sense to us. It seems that Claro should have checked the credentials of the man claiming to represent a corporation. They have resources to do so.

A more reasonable tactic, public relations-wise, would be to turn the phones back on for a limited number of months and swallow the loss caused by the firm’s gullibility. Otherwise, we can guarantee that 1,000 persons will never buy another Claro service as long as they live.

Source: iNews.co.cr

Costa Rica’s National Biodiversity Institute (INBio), an ambitious project to inventory all that country’s biota, is in the midst of negotiating its rescue from financial ruin with the Costa Rican government.

The deal entails the government taking over the maintenance of INBio’s extensive collection of specimens, a US$750,000 annual cost savings that will enable INBio to begin to pay off its debts. At issue, however, is what part of the government will actually foot the bill and what will be the ultimate fate of the collections.

Started in 1989, INBio quickly earned international recognition for its approach to cataloging biodiversity and, after a few years, its success partnering with pharmaceutical companies for “bioprospecting,” or searching for new drugs and other useful chemicals in tropical plants and animals. For the inventory, INBio trained dozens of local residents as parataxonomists who collected and did a first pass on identifying all species. The private, nonprofit organization now has about 4 million specimens in its coffers; they represent about 28% of the Costa Rica’s biodiversity.

INBio has run into financial trouble before, yet managed to keep going by expanding its consulting efforts. But for the past 3 years, INBio has had increasing trouble making ends meet, in part because of a $7 million debt incurred to develop a theme park that provides the public with a chance to experience Costa Rican ecosystems. INBio employs 121 people and spends about US$6 million per year, of which US$750,000 per year goes for the collections.

Until now, INBio has been independent of the Costa Rican government. Initially, INBio relied on grants from international agencies such as the World Bank’s Global Environmental Facility and from national governments, such as Norway and the Netherlands. But that support has been declining, in a large part because Costa Rica is no longer seen as a poor country deserving of much international aid, says INBio’s new director, Randall Garcia. Corporate grants now cover about 20% of the budget. The rest comes from services, such as bioprospecting and other consulting arrangements; editorial services; and the theme park income. But it does not generate enough revenue to pay the interest on its debts.

Three months ago, Garcia was quite worried. But last month, INBio gave control of its collections and its theme park to the Costa Rican government. For now, the collections will stay with INBio, but the maintenance bill will be footed by the government. The money freed up by not having to support the collections will be put toward paying down the debt, says Garcia, who plans to reorganize INBio and expand its consulting services. In addition, the government wants INBio to work on a national biodiversity information system, which would provide one-stop online shopping for biodiversity information. Right now, data on Costa Rica’s plants and animals are scattered among INBio and Costa Rica’s universities and natural history museum. Last week, the four public universities agreed to contribute to this new information system, Garcia says.

But INBio is far from being out of the woods, says Daniel Janzen, who is based at the University of Pennsylvania. He helped found INBio and has been a mover and shaker in Costa Rican biodiversity for decades. He worries that the government will not be able to come to an agreement about how it will finance INBio before the country gets focused on next year’s elections; the campaigns will start revving up this summer. “People may drag their feet,” and a change in power may lead to a loss of support, he says. Janzen is also worried about the fate of the collections. The government may decide that, ultimately, they should be given to a university or natural history museum. The situation is “full of catch-22s,” he says, “How it will get resolved, I don’t know.”

Source: ScienceInsider

Despite the government spending more and more on communication, the image of Presidenta Laura Chinchilla continues to “plummet” (en picada).

Between 2010 and 2013 the government has increased its spending by ¢684 million colones to promote the image of the Laura Chinchilla and her government. Despite the bill, the Presidenta’s images continues to fall, according to national surveys.

In 2010, ¢1.125 billion colones, representing 8.58% of the government’s budget, was spent on “communications”. In 2011, the spending increased to ¢1.136 billion and in 2012 to ¢1.193 billion.  For this year, 2013, ¢1.809 billion colones or 11.65% of the budget has been earmarked for improving the image of Laura Chinchilla and her government.

Despite the increase in spending, polls results show Costa Ricans have a poor image of their Presidenta.

A 2011 poll by Unimer paid for La Nacion showed in September of that year that 29% of the people saw the Presidenta’s performance as “bad” or “very bad”  while in June of that year it had been 25%.

In early 2012, the negative rating had risen to 44% and reached 58% by mid year, meanwhile the approval ratings plummted to a low of only 13% of the population saying the Presidenta is on the right track.

But the image of Presidenta Chinchilla is not only at home. A survey by Mitofsky Consultants show that Costa Rica’s president had the worst rating among 20 American presidents.

The group that filed an objection before the Tribunal Contencioso Administrativo (TCA) – Administrative Court – announced that the “Arias Decree No. 34852-MSP”, that would allow police to use prohibited (banned) weapons to contain demonstrations, is dead.

“With great joy I inform you that the Decree signed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias to allow the Ministerio de Seguridad Publica to use prohibited weapons to control demonstrations, rests in peace thanks to the assistance of those who bravely signed the complaint (depsite the storm of criticism), but more especially to the tenacious and tireless work and monitoring by our lawyer Roberto Zamora”, said Flora Fernández, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Fernández explained that the repeal of the decree was not intended to let the “police forces to fight criminals with ‘toy guns’, as some malicious warmongering, military enthusiasts and lovers of guns and violence said, but to prevent the repression of legitimate protests with banned weapons.”

In the judgement, the Tribunal Contencioso and the Sala Primera recognizes that “police activity and deployment be reasonable according to aggression”, said Fernández.

What it means in real terms is that the decision to use heavy (banned) weapons against defenseless civilians is not up to the simple autorization of a police chief.

The complaint against the state was filed on February 3, 2009 by Flora Fernández Amón, Rodrigo Gerardo Jiménez Vega, Oscar Aguilar Bulgarelli, Juan Carlos Antillón Sargent, Ricardo Jiménez González, Carlos Agustín Páez Montalbán and Fernando Soley Soler. Fernández paid tribue to the memory Dr. Agustín (Tin) Páez, who was plaintiff in the case.

Source: ElPais.cr

In recent months, through the lens of security cameras,  evidence of women committing crimes supports the reports by judicial officials who say the number of crimes committed by organized groups led by women is increasing and nearing that of gangs led my men.

The 2012 census, Estado de la Nación, reveals that 400.000 women or 34.6% of the population are heads of households in Costa Rica, leading judicial authorities to theorize that the trigger to the increase in crimes commited by women is to obtain sustenance for their families.

Among most the notorious of women gangs is “Las Gordas”, a group of women who steal from clothing stores in San José, hiding stolen merchandise under their clothing.

Police say they have seen an increase in reports of stolen milk, school supplies and other staples from local supermarkets.

The National Laboratory of Materials and Structural Models of the University of Costa Rica (LANAMME) says that the San José – San Ramón road design is obsolete, doubting that the road reconstruction as called for in the concession contract will end the problems like congestion on the road.

In the opinion of the LANAMME the design is not the most suitable from various points of view. One point is that the road should be at least two lanes in each direction from start to finish, this would eliminate crossing the median to pass slow vehicles.

The LANAMME feels that the road, as it is currently designed, will be useless in the near future, much in the same way the Ruta 27 (San José – Caldera) has become.

On the Ruta 27, concessionaire Autopistas del Sol, constantly uses “reverse lanes” during peak traffic times, like the start and end of major holidays.