Contempt in the military justice code: an inexplicable oversight in a democratic debate

Abstract

The crimes established in articles 283 and 284 of the Chilean Military Justice Code punish whoever offends the Armed Forces, by word or by writing, and in strict sense they are types of contempt towards authority, analogous to those derogated years ago from the State´s Internal Security Act and the Criminal Justice Code, because of their contrast with the right of free expression, as one of the most efficient controls over the exercise of public power. These crimes towards military legislation have turned into a true legal fossil due to the difficulty to harmonize these means of contempt for respect towards human rights, not only for new generations of attorneys, but also for the national community, who whose silence seem to accept them as part of democratic institutionalization.