The General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) will maintain its current composition, with a conservative majority, at least in the medium term. The mandate of these members has expired for almost five years, due to the PP’s refusal to reach an agreement with the PSOE. The renewal, which involves Parliament, requires a majority of three-fifths of the seats; Therefore, agreement between the two main parties is essential to move it forward. But the PP has been avoiding closing that pact for five years. And this Friday he made it clear again that it is not his priority.
“Pedro Sánchez wants to control the General Council of the Judiciary, as he has done with the Constitutional Court, as he intends to do with all instances. For that, don’t count on us,” said the PP spokesperson in Congress, Miguel Tellado, when asked by journalists about whether his party will accept the renewal of the CGPJ. “Pedro Sánchez is a puppet of the independence movement, and to do everything that the independence movement asks of him he needs to have judicial control, but we are certainly not going to collaborate in that,” he insisted during the first of the open days in the Chamber low and a day after the President of the Government urged the head of the opposition, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, to reach an agreement in the face of the “absurd and intolerable blockade” of the body.
Hours after Sánchez’s words, spoken during an interview on TVE early on Thursday, two judicial decisions hit La Moncloa hard. On the one hand, the Supreme Court annulled the appointment of Magdalena Valerio as president of the Council of State, maintaining that she lacks the “recognized legal prestige” required by law to preside over the highest advisory body of the Government. On the other hand, the CGPJ considered the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, who had just been renewed in office by the Executive, “unsuitable.” This statement by the Council against an attorney general, issued with eight votes from conservative members compared to seven from progressive members, is unprecedented.
The president of Congress, the socialist Francina Armengol, has referred to both resolutions against Government appointments, shortly before welcoming the citizens who have come to the Lower House. “To consolidate our democracy, make it stronger, it is necessary for citizens to feel very close to their institutions, also to the Judiciary. Without citizens feeling that the Judiciary is independent, it is a democracy that has dangers,” the third authority of the State expressed in an interview on RNE.
The EU authorities have reiterated on several occasions the need for Spain to renew the General Council of the Judiciary, something required by the Constitution. But the PP, which throughout these five years has been alleging different reasons for not closing the renewal, insists above all that it will not give in as long as the method of electing the members of the CGPJ is not changed. The Popular Party defends that the 12 member judges – of the 20 that make up the body, the remaining 8 are jurists of recognized prestige – be elected directly by the members of the judicial career, taking away all decision-making power from Parliament. And along those lines of closing any door to negotiation with the PSOE at this time, Tellado was emphatic this Friday in Congress: “We are not going to be Pedro Sánchez’s puppets.”
The PSOE spokesperson, Patxi López, also attended the open-door event in the Lower House, who was listening to Tellado a few meters away and charged against the popular resistance to sealing an agreement, as well as against the CGPJ resolution against the state attorney general. “That someone gives lessons in constitutionalism when they have not complied with the Constitution for five years… And that body also issues orders saying that a state attorney general does not comply, what?” López criticized. “There are only two legal requirements, which [Álvaro García] He performs extremely well: 15 years of experience and recognized prestige in the judiciary. Any other decision about anything else is outside the law and that is what the General Council of the Judiciary has just done, which is outside the law because it has been out of date for five years,” the socialist spokesperson stressed.
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Feijóo, about the verifier: “He hides it because he is ashamed”
The relationship between the Sánchez Government and the PP of Núñez Feijóo is currently one of maximum coldness and confrontation, not only in the area of the Judiciary. The leader of the Popular Party attacked La Moncloa this Friday for refusing to reveal the name of the verifier who will mediate the scheduled meeting between the PSOE and Junts per Catalunya in Geneva (Switzerland) on Saturday. “The Government continues to hide it. I understand that he is embarrassed by the humiliation to which he is subjecting all the citizens of Spain,” Feijóo said in statements to the media during his visit to the ONCE Guide Dog Foundation. “Who is the mediator? How many mediators are there? Who pays them? Where they gather? “What do they agree?” asked the head of the conservatives.
The Government has turned a deaf ear and has persisted in maintaining opacity about the meeting in Geneva and about the figure of the verifier. Neither Patxi López nor Félix Bolaños, the latter Minister of the Presidency and Justice, have given any information about a meeting that will take place outside of Spain because the leader of Junts, Carles Puigdemont, is on the run from justice and cannot set foot in Spain without be stopped. “We will be discreet in the conversations and, when there are agreements, we will make them public,” Bolaños has limited himself to responding, also in Congress, to the question of whether the Henry Dunant Foundation, specialized in international conflicts and which mediated, for example, in the talks for the disarmament of ETA, he is or is not the designated verifier in the meetings between the PSOE and the Catalan independence party.
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