Las reglas de peso probatorio como privilegio de la potestad sancionadora de la Administración del Estado

Abstract

The function of the evidentiary weight rules is to introduce a hierarchy among the evidences available when making a decision. This article refutes the two premises of the thesis arguing that these rules are an unjustified privilege for the Public Administration when it avails itself of the rules assigning evidentiary value to the inspection reports and to other elements of judgment as part of its sanctioning authority. On the one hand, these premises are an application-either indiscriminate or nuanced-of the criminal guarantees for the administrative procedures and, on the other hand, a conceptual confusion among these rules and other adjacent evidentiary categories, such as presumptions, the burden of proof and corroboration rules. This work demonstrates that both assumptions do not stand up on their own since the first premise depends on a political issue that is still open to discussion-and that nowadays seems to be in the direction of a design of guarantees proper to the administrative seat-, while the second premise reveals a categorical inaccuracy among different dogmatic figures that comes from the Chilean legislation itself. Furthermore, this work reveals the way of controlling the risks generated by the use of these evidentiary weight rules as part of procedural privileges of the Administration.