The progressive member of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) Concepción Sáez has resigned as a member of the governing body of judges, whose mandate expired in December 2018 and could not be renewed due to the PP's refusal to reach an agreement with the PSOE.
Sáez, proposed in 2013 by the IU to form part of the CGPJ, communicated her resignation to the alternate president of the Council, Rafael Mozo, by means of a letter sent on the 13th, as Eldiario.es has advanced and this newspaper has confirmed.
In the letter, to which EL PAÍS has had access, Sáez explains that she has made the decision, after meditating on it for a long time, when verifying that the situation of the CGPJ is already "unsustainable".
“The inability to make certain decisions in the ordinary exercise of the powers of this body while calling for the recovery of improper powers of a council in office, has ended up exhausting my patience.
I consider my continuity legally and politically useless in this scenario of radical and perhaps irreversible degradation of the institution”, writes Sáez.
The communication office of the CGPJ sent a communication on the night of this Wednesday in which it confirms that Sáez sent Mozo a letter informing him of his resignation, but points out that this has not yet been accepted.
"The president is considering the acceptance of the resignation, as established in article 582.1 LOPJ [Organic Law of the Judiciary], which will not take place before the plenary session on the 30th."
If Mozo accepts the resignation, the configuration of forces between conservatives and progressives would lean even more in favor of the former, who now have 10 directors, compared to the six that the progressives remain, plus the member Enrique Lucas, proposed by the PNV and who usually vote with the latter although he has stood out on several occasions.
In his letter, Sáez explains to the substitute president why he is taking the step now: "I have trusted that the renewal of this council would occur at some point in the successive occasions on which it seemed imminent and, due to an excessive and perhaps mistaken sense of responsibility , I have been enduring the passing of the months and the years not without restlessness or discomfort, as you well know ”, he points out.
Sáez adds: "At this moment it is difficult to predict when and how this long crisis that is causing so much delegitimization of the image of our judicial system will be resolved."
More information
The substitute president of the CGPJ renounces the salary he received since he took office and which included the presidency of the Supreme Court, which he does not exercise
"The inability to make certain decisions in the ordinary exercise of the powers of this body, while calling for the recovery of improper powers of a council in office, has ended up exhausting my patience," adds Sáez, who since he expired the mandate of the Council has defended that the acting body should not exercise some of its essential powers, such as discretionary appointments.
Since the end of the term and until these were vetoed by a legal reform in March 2021, Sáez was one of the only members who systematically voted blank for all discretionary appointments that were brought to plenary session.
Sáez had been thinking of resigning for five years and this is how he reminds Mozo in his letter.
“I have been meditating for a long time the sense of continuing to hold the position of member of the General Council of the Judiciary for which I was appointed in December 2013. After the five years of the mandate contemplated in the Constitution, plus another four in office, the question becomes unavoidable”, he points out.
In statements to EL PAÍS in December 2018, when the body had just taken office, Sáez stated: "This council is finished and no longer responds to the correlation of forces of Parliament, it has lost legitimacy."
But the vocal had tried to convince other directors to resign and she had not succeeded.
“I don't believe in individual actions.
This step should be taken collectively, at least those of us who have ideological positions that do not bind us to office, but rather understand it as a public service.
And that we believe that you have to be there long enough and with dignity.
Now those characteristics are not given, ”she said then.
Since then, Sáez has considered his resignation on several occasions and, on one of them, he came to notify the then president of the CGPJ, Carlos Lesmes, according to sources consulted.
But Lesmes asked him to hold on and Sáez agreed.
Months later, it was Lesmes himself who ended up resigning after the last attempt to renew the Council by PSOE and PP failed.