A Supreme Court magistrate describes the situation that the administration of justice is going through with a very visual simile: “Justice is a puzzle that has to be perfect in a rule of law;
but in ours, right now, all the pieces are out of place”.
The pieces are the judicial officials, who, after six days of partial strikes and one of 24 hours, have called seven days of strike starting on May 4;
the lawyers on duty, who have started protests to demand salary improvements and charge for work that now they are not paid;
the judges and prosecutors, who, through five of their associations, are calling for an indefinite strike in the middle of the electoral campaign;
and the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), which has had its mandate expired for four years and whose internship hinders the work of the rest.
The only piece that now remains stable, that of the judicial lawyers, is the one that caused the rest to move after starring in two months of indefinite strike and reaching an agreement with the Government that implies salary increases of between 430 and 450 euros per month. .
How have you got here?
Each party argues their own reasons, but all point to some common reasons that have led justice workers to feel "underappreciated."
In the case of the judges, among whom there is no unanimity on whether they have the right to strike, all those consulted warn of a general weariness as a result of the mixture of work overload, lack of means and stagnant remuneration.
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Jorge Fernández Vaquero, from the Francisco de Vitoria Judicial Association, the second most representative and one of the strike conveners, details the history that has led to the situation they denounce today: "We have an obsolete judicial system in essential issues, organization .
With technological means that are being incorporated, but unevenly, uncoordinated and at a slow pace.
A number of judges and prosecutors well below the average for EU countries.
The average is around 20 per 100,000 inhabitants and we have 12. Add to that growing litigation and the avalanche of retirements that are coming our way.
Faced with this, you find that the number of positions for judges decreases,
the laws that have to reduce litigiousness ignore our recommendations and you feel not only carelessness from the administrations, but also absolute contempt: the CGPJ has not been renewed for four years due to political intrigues.
They don't mind harming the functioning of the body that they have to manage on a day-to-day basis”.
According to the latest study by the council, referring to 2021, each year around six million cases enter the Spanish courts.
Many others are solved;
in 2021, for the first time in a long time, almost a hundred more than those who entered were resolved.
But the dispute is endemic and at the end of the year there were still more than three million cases pending.
The Association of Judges and Judges for Democracy has not joined, for now, the strike call pending what happens at the remuneration table, which meets on Wednesday.
But his spokesman, Edmundo Rodríguez, shares the diagnosis with the organizers.
“The problem is that there is a good part of the career that has found that the workload has skyrocketed to unbearable levels.
And there is a discomfort that each one translates in a different way.
For some it is a salary problem;
for others, not so much.
What is certain is that if people were less overwhelmed with work and could devote to work the time it deserves, they would be less discontent”.
The CGPJ data shows that there are more than 750 courts in which the work overload exceeds 150% with respect to the modules established by the CGPJ itself and the Ministry of Justice.
In some cases, the overload reaches 240 or 260%.
"The plant is not well sized," warns Rodríguez.
“It is not only that there is not a sufficient number of courts and judges, but if, for example, the Criminal Procedure Law that provides for prosecutors to assume investigation tasks had been carried out, there would be many judges who would no longer instruct and could work better the rest ”, he adds.
"The impression is that there is disappointment in the judicial career, especially among young people," warns a Supreme Court magistrate who points out that the new judges arrive with "the feeling of being part of a strong State structure."
But they find a very different reality.
“Suddenly their professional and almost vital aspirations are frustrated.
The reality is harsh, almost savage in the eyes of young people, ”says this judge, for whom the announced strike, with which he does not agree, is“ a cry of despair from the judicial career ”.
"It's a wake-up call, a 'keep us in mind."
The General Council of the Judiciary regretted a few months ago the existence of "a structural deficit in the staff of the judicial career."
According to their estimates, by the end of 2023, 382 new judges will have entered the race, while there will be 563 vacancies. That leaves a deficit of at least 181 judges, according to the council, which agreed to ask the Ministry of Justice to increase the number of places in the next calls for tests for access to the judiciary.
The department headed by Pilar Llop claims to be "aware" of this need, but argues that it is a matter that must be provided for in the General State Budget Law.
"Indeed, many judges are going to retire and it is necessary to call for more positions," say ministry sources.
However, Justice recalls that there is an access route to the judiciary, which is the selection process of jurists with recognized competence, which is the "exclusive competence" of the CGPJ.
"In this, according to our data, there is a deficit of more than 200 places accumulated in the years in which the current council has not been renewed," say ministry sources.
But the CGPJ has had its mandate expired for more than four years and this situation is already very noticeable in the day-to-day life of the courts.
To the 80 vacancies generated (22 of them in the Supreme Court) by the legal reform that prevents the body from appointing discretionary positions while it continues in office, the agony of the CGPJ is added.
“He does not have the strength to sit down and negotiate with the ministry reinforcements or measures that we demand.
The CGPJ could have done more,” says María Jesús del Barco, president of the Professional Association of the Magistracy (APM), the majority of the race and with a conservative tendency.
"We are faced with judges who are overburdened with work and with frozen media and whose spokesperson is an expired CGPJ, illegal, who does not represent them, aligned with political parties and contaminates the image of judicial independence," warns a magistrate of the high court, who adds that the impossibility of renewing discretionary positions is also frustrating the professional expectations of veteran judges who aspire to preside over a provincial court or a superior court or to obtain a place in the Supreme Court.
The associations have been demanding improvements in human and technological resources for years, although the current protest is focused on wages and the strike will only be avoided, admit its organizers, if an agreement is reached with the ministries of Justice and Finance at the conference table. Remuneration scheduled for May 3.
In Spain there are 5,668, according to data from the latest CGPJ report, and their salary, like that of the 2,553 prosecutors, is regulated by its own law, Law 15/2003, which regulates the remuneration system for judicial and fiscal careers.
The amount that judges and prosecutors receive at the end of the month is a sum of a base salary and various supplements, which depend on the position, seniority, destination, the objectives achieved and other special compensation.
According to data from the CGPJ, Spanish judges earn between 52,534.52 (judges with less seniority and assigned to smaller municipalities) and 137,935.07 (the president of the National Court).
In the Supreme Court, the salaries range between the 109,072.40 euros that a magistrate receives and the 132,769.12 that the president receives (the current one, being in office, does not receive this amount, but that corresponding to the president of the room, 111,986 .44 euros).
These remunerations are above the average for public sector employees (2,807.1 euros per month in 2021, according to data from the INE active population survey, which includes all workers in the Administration and public companies) and , in many cases, of what the President of the Government receives (90,010 euros per year), but judges and prosecutors demand a "reasonable remuneration adequacy" justified by the loss of purchasing power that they drag, they say, since 2009. The CGPJ has supported this claim by considering remuneration as a guarantee of independence.
"The remuneration system (...) constitutes a backbone of its economic independence, closely linked to independence in the exercise of jurisdictional power",
indicates the body in an agreement approved last Thursday with the vote of the 17 members (ten conservatives and seven progressives).
Judges and prosecutors complain that the law that requires their salaries to be reviewed every five years is being broken and they assure that they have not yet recovered from the salary cut suffered by all civil servants in 2010, in the midst of the economic crisis.
“In 2010 our fixed salary was lowered by 9.73% and by 5% in supplements, a cut greater than that made to other bodies.
And we still have not recovered it ”, assures the president of the APM.
Judges and prosecutors complain that the law that requires their salaries to be reviewed every five years is being broken and they assure that they have not yet recovered from the salary cut suffered by all civil servants in 2010, in the midst of the economic crisis.
“In 2010 our fixed salary was lowered by 9.73% and by 5% in supplements, a cut greater than that made to other bodies.
And we still have not recovered it ”, assures the president of the APM.
Judges and prosecutors complain that the law that requires their salaries to be reviewed every five years is being broken and they assure that they have not yet recovered from the salary cut suffered by all civil servants in 2010, in the midst of the economic crisis.
“In 2010 our fixed salary was lowered by 9.73% and by 5% in supplements, a cut greater than that made to other bodies.
And we still have not recovered it ”, assures the president of the APM.
Justice denies this conclusion and recalls that, apart from increases applied since 2017, for the years 2022, 2023 and 2024 an increase of 8% has been agreed for all officials, likely to reach 9.5%.
"Among the increases that have occurred since 2017 and, in particular, with this one that is being made in the years 2022 to 2024, the reduction of 2010, which was 10%, is far exceeded," say ministry sources.
That the agreement reached by the lawyers of the administration of justice has caused a domino effect that explains the strike of civil servants and that of judges and prosecutors is admitted by all parties.
“They told us that any general improvement for the collective is impossible.
That is why we began to look for specific improvements, for example, the guards, who in the single mixed investigative courts do for 0.35 euros an hour, ”recalls Fernández Vaquero, the spokesman for Francisco de Vitoria.
“But then we find that the lawyers go on strike for two months and give them a raise for everyone.
That has been definitive for our call ”, he admits.
What increase are the judges asking for?
The associations do not agree, although they all agree that there are aspects such as guards and the supplement per population group that must change.
The Progressive Union of Prosecutors (UPF), although it has not joined the strike, has analyzed the points that it is going to bring to the remuneration table and which coincide, essentially, with those of all the associations.
“It is important to update the remuneration of the weekly guards, who have a disproportionately lower amount than the remuneration of a 24-hour guard.
We also believe that we have a percentage of 5% of trienniums that should be updated and raised by two or three points.
And that population groups 4 and 5 [those referring to the smallest municipalities] should disappear,
that suppose a decrease in the remuneration of those who earn less.
We should also recover the purchasing power lost due to the lack of updating our salaries according to the CPI and in relation to the substantial reduction that occurred in 2010″, says Inés Herreros, president of the UPF.
The agreement with the former judicial secretaries has also precipitated the strike of justice administration officials, a body made up of 45,000 people who, for the most part, work under the orders of lawyers and who have now seen how their bosses are wages go up for doing tasks that, they say, are often delegated to the workers under their charge.
“For 20 years we have been demanding that the functions of the bodies of justice be clarified.
Many of those functions that the lawyers have demanded that they be paid are actually carried out by us.
All the papers pass through our hands and the lawyer signs them,” says Javier Jordán, head of Justice at CSIF, the sector's majority union.
The Ministry of Justice denies this situation.
“The officials have been doing the same functions as always, which is to assist the head of the judicial body and also the LAJ [lawyer] in their respective functions.
Given the possible confusion about the functions of each of the parties involved in the procedural laws, work is already being done on the appropriate clarification ”, they point out from the department of Llop, who is a career judge.
The civil servants' unions have brought specific requests to the negotiation with the Government, which is now in a dead end: a salary increase of between 350 and 430 euros per month and changes in the future organizational efficiency law that, they assure, does not guarantee that the fate of each worker is respected.
"Public Function and the Ministry of Justice have to reflect," says Jordán.
“Given the reality that they have a conflict with judges and prosecutors, ex officio duty, officials, the Government has to find a global solution.
The third power of the State, say those who support it, has long been the "Cinderella" of the Administration.
“There is something terribly wrong with the administration of justice.
And I am not holding the current Ministry of Justice responsible because it is up to him to manage it, but this comes from many years ago and many governments ”, warns the spokesman for Francisco de Vitoria.
