New judicial setback for Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska for the awarding of decorations to police officers. The National Court has overturned the award, in 2023, of half a dozen silver medals to retired commissioners because the Ministry of the Interior “totally” ignored the regulatory procedure by “ignoring the intervention of trade union organisations” and did not comply with the provisions of the rules. This type of decoration implies a 15% lifetime increase in the remuneration of the recipient. Police unions have been denouncing that they are awarded arbitrarily and have already taken them to court on several occasions because they consider that the Ministry of the Interior is not complying with the legal requirements when awarding them. At the end of May, the National Court annulled 56 medals awarded in 2022, because the decision had not been justified. On that occasion, in addition to senior officers, there were active officers.
The decision, against which no appeal can be made, was adopted by the magistrate Eva María Alfageme Almena, of the Central Administrative Court number 9 in a sentence issued this Thursday. The police unions Unión Federal de Policía (UFP), Justicia Policial (Jupol) and Confederación Española de Policía (CEP) appealed the awarding of these medals and alleged that they did not know “what was the fact that motivated the awarding of the silver medal” to the retired commissioners who benefited.
In 2023, the General Directorate of the Police proposed for the silver medal the retired main commissioners who, when they retired, held the positions of general commissioner of Scientific Police, head of the Training and Improvement Division, head of the Economic Division, and the higher headquarters of the Balearic Islands, Murcia and Castilla y León. 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 states that, at a meeting held on May 31, 2023, “the unions were not informed of the specific facts that justified the decorations that were intended to be awarded.” “The cause for full nullity is appreciated because the established procedure has been completely ignored by ignoring the intervention of the union organizations,” it adds.
UFP asked for the awarding of these medals to be annulled, alleging “formal defects in the awarding process.” The court joined its claim with those also filed by Jupol and CEP. These two unions consider that the requirements of the law that regulates them, from 1964, were not met, which details the circumstances for obtaining this mention of police merit, such as being injured during or during an intervention, directing a service of “transcendental importance,” having an “exemplary and extraordinary performance” or having “merits of an extraordinary nature.”
The ruling cites case law from other previous cases in which this type of decoration has been annulled due to a lack of motivation for the decision or because a professional career was rewarded and that is not the purpose of this type of recognition, but rather corresponds to a cross with a white badge, which does not entail any financial allocation.
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“We hope that this will be the final ruling that will force the Ministry of the Interior and the General Directorate of Police to stop using medals in an unjustified and crooked manner, to supplement the retirement pensions of senior police officers, while continuing to fail to address the real problem of retirement for all national police officers,” said a spokesperson for the Jupol union.
The CEP union has called on the Interior Ministry to stop awarding these types of decorations. “Both this and previous governments have refused to put an end to an obsolete rule that should be repealed today and replaced by another that is transparent, objective and without room for arbitrariness,” they added in a statement.
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