ABC Editorial: Another authoritarian drive

The debate on the popular accusation in Spain is long-lasting and there is a reasonable consensus on the need to prevent it from being a tool for the politicization of Justice and leaks against the honor of those investigated. However, at the same time, the popular accusation has its roots in the Spanish procedural tradition and since the end of the 19th century it has been respected by the Monarchy, the Republic, the Dictatorship and the 1978 Constitution, which provides for it in its article 125 as a mechanism for citizen participation in Justice. The pernicious effects of a popular accusation serving spurious interests are undeniable, but the courts had taken good note and were applying control measures, such as the unitary representation of all popular accusers in the same process and the expulsion of fraudulent ones. As the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, knows well, leaks to the press are not always attributable to popular accusers.

There has also been agreement between judges and academics on the convenience of excluding political parties from the popular accusation. This is provided for in the draft of the new Criminal Procedure Law. But the real data on the political abuse of the popular accusation puts the target on the PSOE, which is the party formation that has used this accusatory tool most frequently, even recklessly. It is not understood, if this reform was so urgent, why the Government has not introduced it in Organic Law 1/2025, which has modified relevant aspects of the criminal process. The answer is the President of the Government’s overwhelm with his political and personal problems.

Therefore, with the exclusion of political parties and associations identified in the “fachosphere”, Sánchez hopes to satisfy Puigdemont and reduce the possibilities of putting his wife and brother on the bench. This is the purpose of the so-called “transitional provision”, which provides for applying the law to processes that are in process when it comes into force, a covert way of applying it retroactively and stripping the status of popular accusers from those who today have it recognized in all those annoying processes for the PSOE and La Moncloa. Being a bill, the socialist text will not be submitted to the reports of the CGPJ, nor the Council of State, nor the Fiscal Council. Furthermore, it can be processed as the socialists like, through urgency, with hardly any debate or amendments, because it is urgent to address their political needs.

The socialist initiative also provides for a new cause of recusal for judges who, in short, speak too much about the political class, within procedures in which political parties or public officials are part and privately or at events or rallies. . Perhaps the socialist editor of this proposal remembered the manifesto that – before being sentenced to disqualification – Judge Garzón read criticizing the Aznar Government for the military intervention in Iraq. It is good to demand prudence from judges, as the Organic Law of the Judiciary already does, but what the socialist proposal seeks is to send them the message that they should be careful with what they say. In this authoritarian drive, the PSOE reform wants to prohibit complaints that are based on journalistic information, collapsing the interaction between the media, civil society and Justice in the control of public power. It is true that the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court has a doctrine that inadmisses complaints when they are only based on press clippings, but limited to authorized persons and popular accusations, and when, furthermore, there is no personal assessment of the complainant. If it were in force at the time, the famous ‘Bárcenas papers’ would never have reached the court. Take note: judges, journalists and civil society, under suspicion.