Honduras’ political crisis, which became a regional affair when soldiers sent President Manuel Zelaya on an airplane to Costa Rica on June 28, has revealed a basic weakness in Honduran law. Namely, that it doesn’t have an impeachment proceeding. Article 239 in the 27-year-old Honduran constitution says any president that tries to stay in power should immediately be deposed.  Only it doesn’t say how he should be deposed.

A group of lawyers and judges are now saying that Zelaya’s constitutional rights may have been violated when he was removed from the country. They’ve requested an injunction to decide on whether Zelaya’s ouster was legal, which, according to judge Rosalinda Cruz, has been accepted by the Supreme Court.

Cruz told me that the Honduran constitution is “rigid,” but came short of calling for constitutional reforms, perhaps because the last public official who did that ended up in Costa Rica in his pajamas.

On the day when Zelaya was kicked out of the country, the Honduran Supreme Court ruled that he had violated the country’s constitution by trying to change parts of it that can’t be changed.

He had set up a poll that asked if Hondurans would support a referendum to change the constitution,  a move his opponents said was his attempt to stay in power and which he, of course, denied.

But perhaps Zelaya’s biggest crime was ignoring dissent and failing to build consensus for his agenda. He insisted on imposing his poll despite opposition from the judicial system, and led a crowd of supporters to take over materials for his illegal poll in stubborn defiance of the courts. His deepening ties with Venezuela certainly scared the country’s business elite, but is by no means a justification for ousting him, as business leaders here tend to argue.

But the decision to oust Zelaya from the country was clearly a flaw. More and more Zelaya opponents in Honduras are beginning to admit as much, though many argue it was still justified because those who ousted Zelaya did so in good faith: they wanted to avoid violence that would have broken out if Zelaya had been jailed. This is a weak argument.

If Honduras is serious about upholding the rule of law, as acting president Roberto Micheletti says, both sides should be investigated and punished if judges find crimes were committed.

And the country should learn from its mistakes and create the means for a political trial for a president who has allegedly violated the constitution. An impeachment process may have resolved Honduras’ crisis peacefully, but authorities turned this into an international problem when they expelled the president-elect and denied him due process.