Felipe VI has called on Thursday to improve international cooperation “in many areas”, but especially in that of Justice. “We live in a globalized world in which crime is not constrained or limited by borders and its ramifications and consequences can reach all places,” warned the Monarch, who recalled that this globalization extends to other areas such as business or migration, which also require improved collaboration between countries. “It is a world in which migratory movements are intensifying and accelerating: more and more people are moving to other countries for work, family, economic or study reasons or fleeing conflicts or situations of poverty. This makes international cooperation increasingly urgent and necessary in many areas, including, especially, in that of Justice,” said Felipe VI in Guía de Isora (Tenerife), where he attended the II Meeting of the Conference of Ministers of Justice of Ibero-American Countries (COMJIB)which is held in the same space as the 19th Ibero-American Notarial Conference and the Ibero-American Judicial Summit.
The King, who presided over the event, spoke these words sitting between the Minister of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Cortes, Félix Bolaños, and the Canarian President, Fernando Clavijo, in the week in which both governments, the central and the autonomous, have clashed over the protocol approved by the Canary Islands that conditions the entry of migrant minors into their reception centres until the Police comply with a series of procedures. During his speech, Clavijo claimed the Canary Islands as a “land of solidarity that is experiencing one of its most complex moments”. “I trust and hope that forums such as this, where ministers of justice meet to debate and advance the principles and rights of our peoples, also serve to address the response to global challenges such as those represented by migration challenges”, said the President of the Canary Islands. “We are a land open to the world and that today is experiencing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis and makes us a support and a containment wall for all migration coming from Africa”.
Bolaños has avoided referring directly to the migration crisis in the Canary Islands, but has referred to the “challenge to the rule of law” posed by immigrant trafficking, as well as other cross-border criminal phenomena that no country can address on its own. “We need a justice system capable of facing these challenges and providing answers to the victims. An accessible justice system, with a gender perspective, digital, with agile and immediate international cooperation mechanisms and with legal frameworks of the 21st century,” said Bolaños.
The judicial summits taking place these days in Tenerife, in which Ibero-American and Portuguese-speaking countries with a population of 700 million are represented, are seen by all legal operators as an opportunity to strengthen this cooperation that speeds up judicial procedures. In this regard, Felipe VI has highlighted the importance of technology. “It is necessary,” he said, “to maintain and strengthen cooperation between judicial, fiscal, police and notarial institutions through protocols and technical tools that serve Justice and generate confidence, by having a high level of legal and technological security, so that they are protected from fraud and cybercrime.”
The role of technology in cross-border judicial collaboration is one of the themes of the three days of judges, ministers of justice and notaries who are meeting on the island. The meeting is taking stock of the 20th anniversary of the Ibero-American Network for International Legal Cooperation (IberRed), established in 2004, a tool for cooperation in civil and criminal matters that is available to legal operators in 22 Ibero-American countries and the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico, together with organizations such as Eurojust and Interpol, and which now wants to open up to other countries, especially Portuguese-speaking ones. This network has a secure communication system (called Iber@)developed in collaboration with the Spanish Notary Technology Platform, which allows, with maximum guarantees, real-time communication between the contact points designated in each country by the Ministers of Justice, the public prosecutor’s offices and the judicial bodies.
This platform will soon be joined by Iberfides, a tool that will allow the secure circulation of notarial and judicial documents in real time between countries, saving time and costs for citizens, and which Spain has already joined. “There are prosecutors who do things via WhatsApp, that is not safe,” warned Enrique Gil Botero, former Minister of Justice of Colombia and Secretary General of the Conference of Ministers of Justice of Ibero-American Countries (COMJIB) on Wednesday.
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