Lawmakers from Costa Rica’s governing party filed a package of constitutional reform bills on Tuesday that would end the Comptroller General’s power to block state contracts before they take effect, hand the Legislative Assembly full control over the selection of substitute Supreme Court justices, and replace the current system of renewable eight-year magistrate terms with a single term of fifteen years.
The first of the bills, filed under docket number 25.692 with the signatures of seventeen legislators from the Partido Pueblo Soberano and led by deputy Mayuli Ortega Guzmán, would rewrite Article 184 of the Constitution. Under the current text, the Comptroller General’s Office reviews and endorses certain public contracts and payment orders before they can produce legal effects, a procedure known in Costa Rican administrative practice as the refrendo.
The proposed language states that oversight by the Comptroller would be “predominantly subsequent,” and that no payment, obligation or state contract would require the office’s prior approval in order to take effect. Preventive reviews would remain possible where the Comptroller identifies a matter of public interest or fiscal risk, but the findings of those reviews would carry no binding force.
The bill also removes the office’s advance approval of municipal budgets and the budgets of autonomous institutions, and establishes a two-year transition during which existing prior-control mechanisms would continue to apply only in cases the Comptroller designates by reasoned general resolution on fiscal-risk grounds.
Ortega defended the proposal as a modernization rather than a reduction of oversight, telling reporters that the intent is to prevent the Comptroller from halting projects the government considers a national priority, and citing the Ciudad Gobierno complex and the Limón marina as examples of initiatives stalled by prior review.
She said the initiative is not directed against the Comptroller General’s Office, is not a personal attack on any official, and is not an attempt to remove or weaken public controls. The explanatory statement accompanying the bill argues that a shift toward ex post control represents a deeper modernization of the Costa Rican state, one focused on results and accountability rather than on advance permission. The Comptroller General’s Office, headed by Marta Acosta since 2012, had not issued a formal response to the filing as of Wednesday morning.
A second bill, docket 25.693, carries ten signatures with deputy Marta Esquivel RodrÃguez as principal sponsor and would amend Article 164 to transfer the entire appointment process for substitute Supreme Court justices to the Legislative Assembly. Under the system now in force, the Court conducts the competition, evaluates candidates and forwards a shortlist to the Assembly, which then elects from that list.
The reform would eliminate the Court’s role in the preliminary stage, leaving the Assembly responsible for issuing the call for applications, evaluating candidates, conducting interviews and making the final appointment. Esquivel said in presenting the measure that the proposal is straightforward and removes a preliminary stage that in the governing party’s view has raised questions about transparency.
The third measure, docket 25.694, filed by twelve legislators from the governing bench, would amend Articles 158 and 159 to establish a single fifteen-year term for Supreme Court appointments with no possibility of reelection, raise the minimum age for a magistrate from 35 to 45, and require twenty years of professional practice.
The Constitution currently requires ten years of practice as a litigating attorney or five years of judicial service. The explanatory statement argues that life expectancy in Costa Rica has risen by roughly three decades since the Constitution was drafted, a change the sponsors say has distorted the original intent of the eligibility requirements. A transitory provision specifies that magistrates currently in office would serve out the terms for which they were appointed.
The same legislative session brought two additional constitutional proposals from the governing bench: an amendment to Article 24 sponsored by deputy Kattia Mora that would write the right to informational self-determination, meaning individual control over the use and circulation of personal data, into the chapter on individual guarantees; and an amendment to Article 32 broadening the grounds on which Costa Rican citizens may be extradited, a measure President Laura Fernández had announced in late July as part of her security agenda. Ordinary legislation filed alongside the constitutional bills would move administrative, disciplinary and budgetary functions of the Judicial Branch from the magistrates to the Superior Council, authorize police use of electric conducted-energy devices, and suspend criminal statutes of limitation for defendants who remain fugitives.
None of the constitutional measures is close to passage. Amending the Constitution requires the support of 38 of the Assembly’s 57 deputies, and requires that supermajority twice, in two consecutive annual legislative sessions. The Partido Pueblo Soberano holds 31 seats, meaning at least seven opposition votes would be needed on each occasion.
The sponsors acknowledged on Tuesday that negotiations with opposition benches have not begun. Constitutional reform bills must also be submitted for mandatory consultation with the Constitutional Chamber before a final vote, which places the same court whose composition several of the bills would affect in the position of reviewing them.
The filings land in the middle of an escalating confrontation between the executive and the judiciary. They come days after the Constitutional Chamber annulled the Assembly’s second return of the shortlist of substitute justices and ordered that the sitting members remain in their posts, a ruling Fernández publicly characterized as a coup d’état, and after the governing bench filed a criminal complaint against four members of that chamber. A week before Tuesday’s filings, Fernández had called on legislators to bring forward a strong and forceful reform of the Comptroller General’s Office so that its powers would not be left, in her phrasing, unbounded.
What is at stake in the Comptroller measure is the difference between a control that can stop a transaction and one that can only describe it afterward. Prior endorsement is the point at which the office can refuse to let a contract take legal effect; subsequent auditing establishes responsibility once money has already moved, and rarely undoes the underlying agreement. Supporters of the change point out that risk-based, after-the-fact auditing is the standard model in many countries and that advance review has become a bottleneck on public investment.
Critics of the proposal argue that in a system where the Comptroller has repeatedly halted contracts on procedural and legality grounds, removing that authority while leaving preventive observations non-binding shifts the balance decisively toward the executing administration. Both arguments will be tested in committee, and the bills now join a legislative queue in which constitutional reforms routinely take years to resolve.
