The agreement between the PSOE and the PP to sit down to negotiate the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), whose members have had their mandate expired for more than five years, hangs by a thread. The threat is hidden in the second part of that negotiation: the legal reform defended by the PP so that, in future renewals, the judges directly elect, without intervention from the Cortes, the 12 members of the CGPJ. The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the leader of the opposition, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, announced last Friday that they are going to finally sit down to negotiate to unblock the governing body of the judges, but the statements of both parties in the In recent months, and this Tuesday, regarding the legal reform, they point out that this second aspect — which for the PP is a necessary condition to close the first: the change of members — will be very difficult to carry out.
Alfonso Gómez de Celis, secretary of Municipal Politics of the PSOE and vice president of Congress, declared this Tuesday to TVE: “We are based on a fundamental principle established by the Constitution itself, which says that all powers emanate from the people. It cannot be that 2,000 or 3,000 people who have approved an opposition [en referencia a los jueces, que son en realidad más de 5.000] “elect a power of the people, such as in this case the Judiciary, nor would we understand that public officials elect the Government of Spain.”
This position expressed by Gómez de Celis is the one maintained by the Socialist Group in the Congress of Deputies only seven months ago, when the bill that the PP presented for the judges to directly elect the 12 members of origin was discussed in full. judicial of the 20 that make up the CGPJ. On that occasion, the PP's legislative initiative failed, with 176 votes against from the same parliamentary groups that have now supported the investiture of Pedro Sánchez.
The difference is that now the PSOE has agreed to negotiate with the PP, with the intermediation of a representative of the European Commission, a future change in the system of election of the judges. The PP views the Commissioner of Justice, Didier Reynders, with good eyes on this work, who has repeatedly defended that the CGPJ must be renewed with the current law and then change the election system, a “reform that complies with the recommendation of the Council of Europe, which is that the majority of members of the council of judges are elected by their peers.” Sources from the PP point out that the agreement for the renewal involves guaranteeing the reform of the Law to change the system of election of the judges and adds: “The Government had to convince the PP before, now it also has to convince Europe given that has accepted his supervision. “Europe thinks the same as us about the need to reform the election system of the General Council of the Judiciary.”
However, President Pedro Sánchez maintains his veto to a change to the election model of the General Council of the Judiciary in force with slight tweaks since 1985 with the endorsement of the Constitutional Court. “The Government is committed to the democratic, not corporate, model, the same model that was agreed upon with the PP in 2001 and 2013, with the PP having an absolute majority and the PSOE being in the opposition,” Executive sources told EL PAÍS.
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Elías Bendodo, Deputy Secretary of Autonomous and Local Coordination, said this Tuesday: “What the European Commission has asked for in recent months is a depoliticization of judicial bodies. We are willing to negotiate this State of Justice pact where the governing body of the judges is renewed but at the same time a formula for a new form of election of the magistrates who are going to be part of the body of judges is approved, such and as requested by the European Union. What Mr. Feijóo has achieved is to get Mr. Sánchez out of the trenches, sit him down before the European Union and have the European Union tell him to his face that they cannot put their hand in all the institutions of the State. There are State bodies, such as judges, that need to be independent, that is what the PP says, endorsing the words of the European Union.”
Before the vote that the PP lost in Congress last May to change the election system of the General Council of the Judiciary, Feijóo and Sánchez reached an agreement for the renewal, broken by the PP when they learned that the Government was simultaneously processing a reform penal, agreed with ERC, to repeal the crime of sedition. That agreement accepted the renewal of the CGPJ with the current law and, at the same time, assumed the preparation by that body of a proposal to reform the system of election of members of judicial origin within a maximum period of six months. This proposal then had to be endorsed by three-fifths of the CGPJ and transferred to the Government, the Congress and the Senate so that the legislative branch, based on that idea, would submit to the consideration of the Cortes a bill to reform the system of election of the judicial members.
In the Congressional debate, two of the groups that have now voted for Sánchez's investiture proposed a way out of the CGPJ blockade. Both Junts and EH Bildu invited the Government to approve a legal reform by which the members would automatically cease at the end of their mandate, leaving “three members at the head of that body for basic administrative tasks without being able to make any appointment.” The PSOE rejected this formula to end the blockade and also the proposal by its coalition partner, Unidas Podemos, consisting of lowering the majorities necessary to approve the renewal – so that it would not be necessary to count on the PP – in the event that was not possible on a first attempt.
Almost 500 new judges, without options to be part of the CGPJ
Reyes Rincon
The General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) sent to the Cortes in September 2018 a list with the 51 candidate judges to be part of the governing body of judges in the next renewal. This list included the names selected by the judicial associations or who had received the endorsement of their colleagues, and from there the 12 judges elected by the Congress and the Senate must come from if there is a political agreement to unblock the body. But the five years that have passed since that list was drawn up may lead to legal problems in the future, as some jurists have warned, who consider that there is a risk that the next renewal will be appealed before the Constitutional Court.
The main losers of a renewal based on the procedure opened in 2018 would be the members of the four promotions of judges who have joined the career in the last five years. In total, 484 new judges (to whom another 161 will be added during the first quarter of 2024, according to data from the CGPJ) who will not be able to be part of the new Council because they could not participate in that process and, therefore, are not in the shortlist. Jurists warn that some of them could appeal to the Constitutional Court because they consider that their right to access public functions and positions under equal conditions has been violated (article 23.2 of the Constitution).
In the last negotiation between the PSOE and the PP, in November 2022, the two parties even considered the possibility of urging the CGPJ to restart the process with the associations and judges interested in being part of the body and to prepare a new list of candidates. But the CGPJ, when this possibility has been raised, has always defended that this would require reforming the Organic Law of the Judiciary (LOPJ) because, with the current wording, the rule does not contemplate the expiration of the procedure, so there is no legal basis. to discard the list and make a new one. Following this criterion, the PSOE and the PP agreed to base the renewal on the list prepared in 2018.
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