Supreme Court declares inadmissible appeal that sought to avoid use of Elisa Loncon’s image in book on the Constitutional Convention

The Supreme Court ratified the inadmissibility of the protection appeal filed by the former president of the Constitutional Convention, Elisa Loncon, against the former conventional Renato Garín and Editorial Catalonia for the use of her image on the cover of the book “The Failure, how the Convention was set on fire”.
Loncon said that on October 20 he learned via WhatsApp that Garín disseminated in a group of former constituents the cover of his future book, which on its cover contains an image of him along with other symbols and the face of the controversial former conventional Rodrigo Rojas Vade.

The former president of the body that drafted the constitutional proposal rejected on September 4, adds that due to her participation in the Constituent Convention as head of it, and because she is a Mapuche woman, she has been the victim of a series of attacks which persist over time. In addition, he considered that the unauthorized use of his image in a book “of negative connotation” violates his fundamental rights of physical and mental integrity; of honor and privacy; and ownership.
The use of her image without her consent and given the acts of violence she suffered, would also carry the provisions of the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women.
For these reasons, Elisa Loncon requested that the defendants cease the dissemination of the cover of the aforementioned book that includes a photograph of her face (in social networks and media).
However, the Court of Appeals of Santiago declared the protection action inadmissible, considering that “(…) the presentation has not mentioned facts that could constitute a violation of the constitutional guarantees indicated in article 20 of the Constitution, which is why the rule of inadmissibility provided for in the second paragraph of paragraph 2 of the Agreed Order of the Supreme Court on the Processing of the Remedy of Protection is applicable. therefore, the present arbitration is declared inadmissible”.
The Supreme Court then upheld the decision declaring the protection appeal inadmissible. “Today freedom of expression has triumphed again. The Supreme Court was clear: we defeated censorship,” said the book’s author, also former congressman Renato Garín.
Garín mentioned that his book has been detained, unable to enter bookstores, due to this “unusual protection appeal presented by Elisa Loncon at the beginning of the month.”
“We had to suspend the presentation, stop sales and change all times. All this had costs for the Catalonia publishing house, for Filsa and for the booksellers who live from this. Today, finally, the Supreme Court gave us the go-ahead and we can begin to distribute,” said the former conventional, ensuring that the judicial appeal sought to “censor the book, directly and unambiguously.”
“The strategy to camouflage this was to use Mrs. Loncon’s ‘right to image’ as a legal asset affected by the cover of the book. Predictably, both the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court rejected the remedy of protection. This allows us to undress the censors who are willing to act as offended to silence the opposite,” Garín concluded.

“I hope this is the end of the authoritarian plays against me and those close to me,” he said.
Judgment Court of Appeals by El Mostrador on Scribd

Supreme Court Judgment by El Mostrador on Scribd

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Original source in Spanish