Not even a month has passed since eight alleged drug traffickers aboard a semi-rigid boat ended the lives of two civil guards in the port of Barbate and the head of the local court that is investigating it has already changed. The event, investigated as a murder, caught the Court of First Instance and Investigation of Barbate (Cádiz) with the change already set and, for two weeks, the case has been being investigated by a new judge. This high turnover, so common in the courts of Cádiz, is, predictably, one of the conclusions that the General Council of the Judiciary will reach after it has decided to analyze the overload situation that the courts of Cádiz and Huelva are experiencing due to the causes of drug trafficking.
The Judiciary has commissioned a report from its inspection service on the situation in the courts of the five municipalities most affected by drug trafficking cases: Barbate, Sanlúcar de Barrameda and La Línea de la Concepción (in Cádiz) and Ayamonte and Moguer (Huelva). The permanent commission of the CGPJ has made this decision after analyzing a report sent by the Francisco de Vitoria Judicial Association (AJFV) which highlights the great overload of work and the limited resources of these bodies, and proposes, among other measures, that The National Court assumes investigations into large drug trafficking networks “regardless of the area in which they operate.” The judges have sent the Government the proposals from the aforementioned report that require reforming the Organic Law of the Judiciary (LOPJ) and the Criminal Procedure Law (Lecrim).
The report on the situation of the investigative and first instance courts of the aforementioned municipalities, gateways for hashish and cocaine drug traffickers and large shipments of drugs by sea, must specify what measures can be adopted to reduce the burden of work. These judicial bodies, especially the 19 in the three Cádiz cities mentioned, have to combine the investigation of complex drug trafficking cases with the rest of civil, criminal and family matters (they are usually mixed courts).
The overload and saturation of all these courts is so evident that already, in January 2023, the Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office of Cádiz assumed the prescription of a process that Court Number 2 of Barbate had been conducting since 2007 and that had been stuck without progress. The same institution has on its radar cases from 2012, 2013 or 2014—years in which the Civil Guard put more pressure in the area—that are in a similar situation in Barbate courts and that risk suffering the same fate. Hence, the Provincial Court of Cádiz has been alerting for years about the situation and the need for more courts, personal and material resources.
The letter from the professional association already anticipates the need for a series of measures that involve both the Ministry of the Presidency and Justice, the Ministry of the Interior – responsible for reinforcing police resources – and the Junta de Andalucía – responsible for judicial headquarters and the administrative staff of these. The proposal for the Ministry of Justice, which the Permanent Commission of the CGPJ has already agreed to transfer, would mean the reform of the Organic Law of the Judiciary and the Law of Criminal Procedure, since it encompasses proposals such as the assumption by the National Court of drug trafficking crimes.
To this, the Francisco de Vitoria association adds the proposal to release the investigating judge from the resolution of reform appeals, limit the cases in which appeals can be filed against decisions of the instructor, establish a dangerous salary supplement in the areas considered especially conflictive, the implementation of Courts of Instance in the medium term and unification of procedural management systems. The entity also begins to request other extrajudicial issues that will be transferred to the Interior and the Andalusian Junta: the reinforcement of the security forces and the appointment of new lawyers from the administration of Justice and civil servants, respectively.
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The Special Security Plan for Campo de Gibraltar, implemented in 2018 and now in force in various Andalusian provinces, already led to police reinforcement in the area. With the idea of avoiding the funnel, the Ministry of Justice and the Government of Andalusia coordinated to create in 2019 two more courts in Algeciras – one for investigation and one criminal -, one for investigation in La Línea – number 5 – and another the same in San Roque —number 3—, in addition to a new magistrate position in the Algeciras section of the Provincial Court.
But the bottleneck was still there. The traffic jam is so pronounced that, as happens in other civil servant positions in the area, many judges choose to leave the area as soon as possible. This leads to singularities such as the fact that the head of Court number 3 of La Línea de la Concepción, Alba Serrano, is the senior judge of the town, despite having been there since 2021. Serrano, upon her arrival at her own request, found herself with macro police cases that took up to nine years of investigation, divorces that had been pending for four years or child custody trials in which the children were already of age, as the judge told EL PAÍS a year ago.
A year later, little has changed, as recognized by another judicial source in the area, which emphasizes the need to implement a new Criminal Procedure Law that streamlines investigation processes in general. This, together with the lack of personal and material resources, the high turnover of judges and officials and the macro-causes of drug trafficking that require complex investigation, have created a perfect storm that slows down local courts, beyond those outlined by the CGPJ that it intends to investigate. In addition to La Línea, Barbate or Sanlúcar, drug trafficking zones at different times, the dispersion of drug trafficking driven by the police blockade has led to complicating the situation in the courts of Chiclana or El Puerto de Santa María, where trials without inmates and not linked to drug trafficking become collateral victims of the collapse caused by drug trafficking.
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