President Fernández accused four justices of the Constitutional Chamber of staging a coup d’état on Friday and announced that the governing-party legislative bench will file a criminal complaint against them on Monday over a ruling that provisionally extended the appointments of the court’s substitute justices.
The announcement was delivered in a video recorded at Casa Presidencial, where Fernández appeared alongside Legislative Assembly president Yara Jiménez and deputies of the governing Partido Pueblo Soberano. Fernández said the Chamber’s decision to extend appointments that expired on December 16, 2025 was illegal and unconstitutional, and that the power to appoint, remove or extend the terms of justices belongs exclusively to the Legislative Assembly. She cited articles 9, 11, 121, 154, 157, 158 and 164 of the Constitution in support of that position.
Jiménez said the complaint will be filed before the Secretariat of the full Supreme Court and will allege the offense of prevaricato against justices Fernando Cruz Castro, Paul Rueda Leal, Ingrid Hess Herrera and Jorge Araya García, the four who formed the majority. The Chamber rejected the coup characterization the same day, defending the ruling as grounded in law and describing the Executive’s statements as disproportionate.
What the Constitutional Chamber ruled
The ruling, adopted Thursday by a vote of four to three, resolved an appeal brought by a private citizen who argued that his cases had stalled because sitting justices had recused themselves and the court could not be properly constituted without substitutes to replace them.
The Chamber provisionally extended the appointments of the substitute justices whose terms ended last December and held that the extension remains in force until deputies elect replacements. It voided the Legislative Assembly’s agreement returning the candidate list to the Supreme Court and ordered Jiménez to bring the matter to a vote using the existing list of 18 candidates, from which at least nine substitutes must be chosen. The Supreme Court had sent that list to the Assembly, and the governing bench had returned it twice without voting.
Voting with the majority were Cruz, Rueda, Araya and Hess. Justices Fernando Castillo, Luis Fernando Salazar and Anamari Garro dissented and would have rejected the appeal.
What a substitute justice does
The Constitutional Chamber, known here more commonly as Sala IV, is made up of seven sitting justices. Substitute justices are elected by the Legislative Assembly to step in when a sitting justice is absent, disqualified or recused from a particular case. Recusal is routine rather than exceptional, and it occurs whenever a justice has a prior connection to a matter that would compromise impartiality.
Without a pool of substitutes, a case in which one or more sitting justices have recused themselves cannot be assigned a full bench, and it simply waits. That is the mechanical problem the ruling addresses. At the time of the decision, 123 case files were reported to be stalled for that reason, including claims involving pensions and access to health care. The Chamber described the extension as a transitional measure adopted to prevent the court from seizing up entirely.
What Prevaricato means under Costa Rican law
Prevaricato is an offense in the Costa Rican Penal Code that applies to judicial and administrative officials who issue rulings contrary to the law, or who base rulings on facts they know to be false. It is not a charge of simple legal error. It turns on knowledge and intent, which is what makes it both a serious accusation against a judge and a difficult one to prove.
The government’s filing takes the form of a querella rather than a denuncia. A denuncia routes an accusation through the Public Ministry, which decides whether to pursue it. A querella is a private criminal action advanced by the accusing party itself. Constitutional lawyer Marvin Carvajal noted that any official with decision-making authority can be accused of prevaricato, but said that filing an accusation does not establish that an offense occurred, and that the choice of a querella suggests the accusing side does not expect prosecutors to find a crime here.
Carvajal also said the complaint does not suspend the ruling. The order directing the Assembly to vote remains in effect while any complaint proceeds.
How the Chamber and legal scholars responded
In a written statement, the Constitutional Chamber said its decision responded exclusively to the constitutional mandate to protect citizens from the consequences of having no substitute justices available, and that its rulings are properly founded in legal norms and principles. It called the Executive’s remarks disproportionate and inconsistent with the respect that should prevail among branches of government, and said it would continue to act with firmness and independence.
Constitutional lawyer Hubert May said the ruling neither disregards nor violates the separation of powers, arguing that an invasion of powers occurs when one branch usurps the functions of another, and that the Chamber had instead ordered another branch to exercise a function it already holds. Rubén Hernández said the justices were correct to adopt an exceptional extension, describing extension as a general principle of law used to preserve continuity of service. Constitutional lawyer Manrique Jiménez also rejected the government’s characterization of the ruling.
Opposition figures backed the court. Deputy Claudia Dobles, who served as first lady between 2018 and 2022, said the Assembly is the body that has failed to meet its obligation to elect substitutes. Former president Luis Guillermo Solís described the government’s accusations as extremely serious.
What happens next
The querella is expected to be presented on Monday. Separately, the Assembly remains under the Chamber’s order to vote on substitute justices using the list of 18 candidates already in its hands, an instruction the governing bench has resisted for roughly seven months.
The confrontation continues a pattern that began under the previous administration, and it now places two branches of government in open dispute over which of them controls the composition of the highest constitutional court. How that dispute is resolved will say a good deal about where the boundary between them actually sits.
