The legislators approved two motions of order to hold seven extraordinary sessions on Wednesday and Thursday to hasten the debates on the emergency bill.

The deputies will meet at different times in order to grant the legal time to the presentations and voting of the 529 motions, 519 of them delivered by Carolina Delgado, parliamentarian of the National Liberation Party.

The urgency to discuss this bill, which received fast track last month, lies in the fact that it must be approved no later than June 6th in order to prevent a dozen criminal gang leaders from being released due to the ending of their preventive imprisonments.

The objective of the legal reform is to extend the deadlines for conducting investigations, debates, pre-trial detention and even appeals, when dealing with this type of crime, in addition to extending the time for deliberation and sentencing.

The reform is one of the five legal proposals which seek to tackle the wave of crime that Costa Rica is facing, with a record number of almost 330 homicides so far this year.

Six hundred and fifty-four murders at a rate of 12.6 per 100,000 inhabitants were recorded in the country in 2022, both also all-time heights.

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