Santo Domingo.– Legislators from different benches agreed that the National Congress must pass a law regulating the hours for the sale of alcoholic beverages, after the Constitutional Court (TC) declared Decree 308-06 unconstitutional, considering that the measure lacks the legal backing required by the current Constitution.
The decision is contained in judgment TC/0689/26, through which the high court concluded that, although the decree pursued a legitimate purpose by regulating the hours for the sale of alcoholic beverages, it could not be maintained indefinitely without a law to support the restriction of fundamental rights.
However, the Constitutional Court granted a period of two years for Congress to legislate on the matter.
In that sense, Deputy Tobías Crespo stated that the ruling does not represent a setback, but rather an opportunity for Congress to establish a regulation through an organic law.
“What the court did was send Congress to pass a law, because any restriction of rights requires an organic law,” he stated.
He added that, when the decree began to be applied, it contributed to reducing crime levels, traffic accidents, and violent deaths related to alcohol consumption.
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For his part, Senator Franklin Romero maintained that the decree had been in effect for nearly 20 years and that it was time to turn that regulation into a law.
“We must then create the law for that now,” he stated, while considering that the Constitutional Court has the authority to order Congress to legislate on these types of matters.
Meanwhile, Deputy Rafael Castillo pointed out that the ruling seeks to provide greater legal strength to a regulation that, in his view, has yielded positive results.
“What the Constitutional Court ruling seeks is to perpetuate what the decree says into a law, so that it has the rigor it should have,” he indicated.
The congressmen agreed that the two-year period granted by the Constitutional Court will allow the current regulation to remain in force while Congress reviews and approves a law that definitively establishes the hours for the sale of alcoholic beverages in the country.
