The Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños (right of the image), meeting with the Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, in Brussels, within the framework of the preparatory work for the Spanish presidency of the Council of the European Union for the second half of 2023.Moncloa / Raúl Salgado (MONCLOA/EFE)
The European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, meets this Wednesday with the Minister Félix Bolaños and the PP deputy, Esteban González Pons, with the mission of reaching an agreement between the Spanish Government and the first opposition party to renew the General Council of the Judicial Branch (CGPJ).
The veto that the PP has maintained for five years blocks the renewal of the Government of the judges, a body that throughout this time of expired mandate has had an absolute majority of conservative members converted into a political battering ram against the Executive.
Reynders also intends to mediate between Bolaños and González Pons to guarantee, in addition to the urgent renewal, the reform of the law that regulates the Council election system.
The European Commissioner for Justice defends that this legal reform “takes into account European standards”, which supposedly require that at least half of the General Council of the Judiciary be elected directly by the judges.
The law has established since 1985 that the Congress and the Senate elect the 20 members of the Council.
The 12 member judges are selected by both chambers from a list provided by the judges themselves through the collection of endorsements or proposals from judicial associations.
At least 43 judges – who received support from their colleagues or were proposed by one of the four judicial associations – have been waiting for five years for the Congress and the Senate to elect the 12 members of judicial extraction for the new Council.
The PP makes it a non-negotiable condition to facilitate the renewal that a legal reform be presented to change the Council election system.
The Government, for its part, defends the “democratic by Parliament and non-corporate by the judges” election of the CGPJ.
The conservative party has the European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, as an ally of its proposal, who points out that the model must be reformed so that judges are elected by their counterparts and not by politicians, in accordance with European standards.
“There is no rule in the community legal system that requires that members of judicial councils be elected by their counterparts,” clarifies Paloma Biglino, professor of Constitutional Law who has researched and published a report on “European standards on judicial elections.” judicial councils.
The professor clarifies that there is only one recommendation approved in 2010 by the committee of ministers of the Council of Europe, which establishes the following: “that no less than half of the members of these councils be judges elected by their peers from all the levels of the Judiciary with respect to pluralism within the Judiciary.”
Some institutions of the Council of Europe itself, such as the Group of States against Corruption (Greco) or the Venice Commission, have followed this recommendation when carrying out their rounds of evaluations.
“But not even the Conditionality Regulation of the European Union, whose article 2 lists the principles that specify the rule of law, contains a provision of this type,” writes Biglino.
The PP Government approved in 2013, three years after the recommendations of the Council of Europe, a reform of the Judiciary that kept the election of the 20 members in the hands of Parliament.
Then, the PP defended a reform that disregarded the recommendations of the Council of Europe to which it now clings.
“The law guarantees the representation of the entire judicial career in the governing body of judges.
Therefore, any judge may present his candidacy as a member of the General Council of the Judiciary with the sole condition of providing the endorsement of twenty-five members of the judicial career in active service or that of a judicial association.
Each judge or association may in turn endorse a maximum of 12 candidates,” Mariano Rajoy's Government said then.
The European Commission did not reproach Spain for this 2013 legal reform that kept the election of the 20 members of the CGPJ in the hands of the deputies and senators.
The conservative associations of judges, which now demand a change in the system, did not raise their voices against the PP reform then either.
In 2020, the European Commission began to prepare and publish annual reports on the situation of the rule of law in each of the member countries.
And since then, when referring to Spain, the main problem stands out as the lack of renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary (blocked since 2018 by the PP) and the need to reform the law to change the election system.
The report by Professor Paloma Biglino highlights that the Venice Commission recognizes the variety of formulas that exist in Europe regarding the election of the Council of the Judiciary and recalls that there are countries where judicial appointments are made by the Government in power.
In Spain, appointments to judicial positions depend on the General Council of the Judiciary and require a qualified majority, although when, as now, their mandate has expired, they cannot make these appointments after an urgent legal reform that the Government promoted to force renewal. of this organ.
To get out of the “trouble,” Professor Biglino only sees the option that “the judges elect the judges, which would avoid the blockage in the renewal of the Judicial Branch.”
“And those who say that this would cause all the members to be conservative because the conservative associations are in the majority, I believe that is not the case because there are many non-associated judges who vote,” she adds.
The lack of renewal of the Judiciary has already caused significant damage to the Supreme Court, where almost a third of its staff of judges (retired or deceased during this time) have not been able to be replaced, which has caused 1,000 fewer sentences to be issued. every year, according to the latest statistics from the Council itself.
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