Resistance and solidarity continue
Throughout the following years, the legal case in which the original judge ruled that the cooperative had to leave the hotel, continued to advance through different levels of the judiciary, always with unfavorable result for workers. The appeal by the cooperative’s lawyers was granted by the judge and then rejected in appellate court on May 20th, 2008, by the National Chamber of Appeals for Commerce, Room C. In that presentation, the Secretariat of Human Rights of the Nation, whose head was Eduardo Luis Duhalde, had presented himself as amicus curiae of the cooperative, but none the less, the chamber confirmed the original judgment.
This resolution of the Chamber was also appealed, but the next court rejected it on August 16th of the same year. Diego Carbone, the cooperative’s lawyer, explains that then “what we did is appeal for extraordinary remedy before the Supreme Court, but the Court of Appeals denied it, saying that there’s no Constitutional matter to appeal before the Court.” From then on, it remained a complaint before the Supreme Court of the Nation. The Court allowed some time to pass before it also rejected the petition, and thus validated the judgment of Paula Hualde, on July 5, 2011. “The Court says that it was all right that the petition was not granted, that will not take it up as a Constitutional matter,” explains Carbone. “In that sense, it obviously was a fatal blow, because we we understand that, yes, there are clashing constitutional rights: the right to property against the right to work.” The lawyer adds that, all that time that the file was in the Court, Hualde had stopped it. She did not advance it, even though she could have.
From that moment on, the cooperative was left with only one way out, which was expropriation.