When on the night of October 27, 2022, the PP announced that it considered the negotiations with the PSOE to renew the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) broken, the agreement was already closed. Socialists and popular parties had agreed on a list with 32 names: the 20 members of the body and 12 substitutes and a bill to strengthen justice. Now, Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo have agreed, as the latter has announced, to resume the talks where they left off, so the negotiation should not this time run aground on the names of candidates, as happened in previous attempts.
The list of preselected in 2022 was never released, but the negotiators explained that it was based on the relationship that the PSOE and the PP agreed to in 2018, which had been almost completely disseminated before the pact was blown up by the message sent to his group by the spokesperson of the PP in the Senate, Ignacio Cosidó, in which he boasted that, with the election of magistrate Manuel Marchena as president of the CGPJ, the popular ones would continue to control the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court “from behind” , which investigates corruption cases that affect politicians qualified before that body. That was the first attempt to renew the current Council and, since then, more than fifty candidates have been waiting for an agreement for five years.
The law establishes that, of the 20 members of the body, 12 must be judges and 8, jurists of recognized prestige. They are all elected by the Congress and the Senate (six judges and four jurists each chamber), but while for the jurists there are no prior candidates and the parties can elect them freely, for the magistrates there is a closed list of candidates selected by the own judges. This procedure is directed by the CGPJ, which for the current renewal sent a list of 51 names to the Cortes in September 2018, of which 27 were endorsed by four associations (Francisco de Vitoria, Judges and Judges for Democracy, Professional Association of the Judiciary and Judicial Agora), which represent around 2,654 judges—almost half of the judicial career. The rest (24) gathered the support of their colleagues (at least 25) to present their candidacy. From that list must come the members agreed upon by the PSOE and the PP for the quota of judges.
However, after five years of frustrated renewal, the list has been reduced and of the initial 51 there are at least nine who are no longer eligible. There is one who died (César José García Otero) and magistrates who have retired (Jesús María Calderón, Lucía Ruano or Inés Huerta). But there are also applicants who have given up going to the CGPJ, among them, some who were among the 12 initially selected in 2018.
Some of the candidates who were expected will not be in the next CGPJ, such as Supreme Court judges José María del Riego (resigned) or Inés Huerta (retired last March). The law establishes that in the CGPJ there must be three Supreme Court justices, and on the list of 51 there were only 4, including the 2 already retired, so the rule can no longer be met at this point and the other 2 candidates —José Antonio Montero and Ángel Arozamena—have secured their position, with no room for negotiation between the parties. The law provides that, if there are no candidates for members within any of the categories (in addition to Supreme Court justices, there must be three judges with more than 25 years in the judicial career), the vacancy will move to the next quota.
Judge Victoria Rosell, who until a few weeks ago was the Government's delegate against gender violence, has also resigned from the list of judges preselected in 2018. Rosell, who has requested his return to the judiciary, could not be part of the body either if the PSOE and the PP maintain a condition that they agreed upon during the 2022 negotiation: that those who have held positions linked to politics in the past cannot be appointed members. immediately preceding five years. This requirement also left out one of the names proposed by the PP for the quota of jurists, Manuel Altava, popular senator until 2019. Among the jurists selected in 2018 by this party was also the lawyer José Miguel Castillo, former PP deputy. Castillo left Congress in 2016, so, in theory, the five-year wait to be able to be a member has already passed, although sources from the popular party claimed to have renounced this name in the negotiation a year ago.
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The situation of another of the names agreed upon in 2018 and that the PP vetoed in subsequent negotiations has also changed, Judge José Ricardo de Prada, who signed, together with another conservative magistrate, the sentences of the Gürtel case, later ratified by the Supreme Court. He was a candidate for the turn of jurists because at that time he was in special services as a United Nations judge in The Hague, but he is now back in his place at the National Court. He could ask again to go to special services to be part of the body, but already in the 2022 negotiation it was reported that the PSOE was willing to renounce this name and the judge did not seem very interested in maintaining his candidacy either.
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