New judicial setback for the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska. The National Court has annulled 56 decorations that the General Directorate of the Police granted in September 2022 to as many officers. These are, specifically, seven silver medals for senior officers who were retiring, and 49 red crosses for active agents, all of them with a lifetime financial bonus ranging from 15% of the base salary and trienniums for the former to 10%. of the latter. They are known as medals for bravery. Each year, the National Police spends more than 11 million euros to pay the lifetime pensions generated by the more than 4,600 pension medals awarded in the last 45 years.
The ruling is also known a year after the National Court rectified another decision of the Minister of the Interior on decorations, although then it went in the opposite direction. Grande-Marlaska had awarded Civil Guard Colonel Manuel Sánchez Corbí – whom he had dismissed as head of the Central Operational Unit (UCO) in the summer of 2018 – a white cross, the lowest category of those awarded by the institute. armed. Justice ordered him to present the Silver Cross, one of the highest, to the command.
The new ruling, handed down by the head of the Central Administrative Litigation Court 1, Lourdes Pérez Padilla, comes after four police unions – Police Justice, the Unified Police Union, the Federal Police Union and the Spanish Police Confederation – presented separate lawsuits in which they requested the annulment of part of the general order that in September 2022 awarded more than 2,800 medals, in its various categories, on the occasion of the celebration on those dates of the patron saint of the institution. The vast majority of those decorations were white crosses, which only represent an honorary recognition for the agent who receives them, since they do not entail any type of financial reward.
Specifically, the unions Jupol, UFP and CEP appealed the granting of the 10 silver that were awarded that year to retiring police commissioners. The SUP added to these the 49 red crosses that were received by as many police officers at different levels. The organizations argued that there had been “formal defects” in the concession process and that, in addition, the individual files in which their concession must be justified did not comply with “the legally enforceable requirements”, since they did not detail the specific reasons why was granted to them. For its part, the ministry defended that “all regulated procedures had been complied with and respected,” including listening to the police unions and allowing them to make allegations if they considered them to be in accordance with the law.
Now, the judge agrees with the unions by concluding, on the one hand, that the Interior ignored the “necessary” intervention of the unions in the concession process, since she considers it proven that the files were not delivered to them in writing, but rather that They were simply informed verbally in a meeting that lasted just over half an hour. The judge considers that the information they received then “should have been, at a minimum, incomplete and summarized.” On the other hand, the judge points out that, after analyzing the file of each of the medals, in them “there is nowhere any assessment of the proposals, as well as the reason for said concessions”, an essential element “in order to to be able to verify adequate jurisdictional control.” For all these reasons, the judge annuls the award of the 56 medals and rejects the request of the State Attorney’s Office that had proposed reversing the proceedings and starting the entire process again. The decision comes when the court has other similar demands on the table for the granting, a year after the now annulled ones, of other silver medals to senior police officers.
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In the National Police, the awarding of medals, especially those that entail a financial reward, has always been surrounded by controversy when considering police unions that give rise to numerous arbitrariness. Their delivery is regulated by a 1964 law. This Franco rule reserves decorations for bravery for those agents who have been “injured in the act of service”, have participated “in three or more services” in which there was a risk of aggression with weapons. , have carried out an act “selflessly in circumstances of danger to their person” or through conduct of special significance.
This last phrase is what gives rise, as the unions have been denouncing for years, to all kinds of subjective interpretations that have allowed the different Ministers of the Interior to allegedly reward related agents in a discretionary manner. In fact, that was the argument that the Interior used at the time to award pension medals to seven alleged members of the so-called patriotic brigadea good part of which are one step away from sitting in the dock for spying on former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas.
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