By Carlos Camacho
Latin American Herald Tribune

CARACAS -- Venezuela’s Supreme Justice Tribunal (TSJ) said Monday that a September decision by the Organization of American States’ InterAmerican Human Rights Court "ordering" Venezuela to allow Leopoldo Lopez to run for President was “unexecutable”, meaning he will not be able to compete against President Hugo Chavez in the October 2012 Presidential elections.

In the decision, published by the tribunal on Monday, the TSJ said that Lopez's political rights are not being hampered, since the decision to prevent him from running was an administrative one, not a political one. Lopez "enjoys the political rights consecrated in the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, since this is just an administrative prohibition and not a political one," since for example, he can still vote.

In 2008 Venezuela was ordered to reinstate a judge that had been fired in 2003 and to this day has not done so.

Lopez, a former mayor of the wealthy Chacao municipality in Eastern Caracas, has been accused of corruption because of two donations to his political party from an office at state oil company PDVSA where his mother worked and while he was also working there. Even if there is no final sentence against him, the government has forbidden him from seeking elected office since 2008. The OAS court however decided in September that Lopez could run since he had not been convicted of a felony and ordered Venezuela to allow him to run. Lopez’s office declined to comment on the supreme tribunal’s decision.

Lopez, 40, married and father of a young girl, is a Harvard-educated family descendant of Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of Latin America. Bolivar is the namesake of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian movement.