The General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) has still not reached an agreement to elect its new president. The votes on Wednesday ended with a new tie, after yesterday’s, between the conservative and progressive blocs in favor of their respective candidates, the magistrates Pablo Lucas and Pilar Teso.
The governing body of the judges has agreed to continue negotiating until Monday, the day on which the legal period of seven days from the formation of this Council for the appointment of the person who should be at the head of the Judiciary for the next few years theoretically ends.
The two candidates have tied again with 10 votes, which is exactly the number of members of each of the blocks agreed on June 25 between the PSOE and the PP. If this situation is not resolved now, it could be postponed until September, close to the opening of the judicial year by the King. The blockage means that the more than 120 pending vacancies in important judicial positions remain unrenewed. Some members accept that the situation is “dramatic”.
Following the tie in the first vote on Wednesday, the president of the Council called the 20 members together again at midday, when once again there was no consensus for any of the candidates to obtain the minimum 12 votes required by law to be elected president and simultaneously hold the presidency of the Supreme Court. Faced with this blockage, the president of the Council has chosen not to even open the voting process.
“If we do not reach an agreement, we will be in absolute paralysis, without being able to take the urgent measures that justice needs. It is dramatic. The previous Council had limited functions, we do not even have that,” is how one of the members of the Judiciary sums up his state of mind. The panorama seems to have collapsed again, in this case due to the entrenched positions of the two blocks. A source familiar with the conversations reveals that the “conservative group is a rock around the candidacy of Pablo Lucas and sells him for his unbeatable curriculum” and adds that, on the other hand, “the progressive group insists that we must not miss the opportunity for a woman to preside for the first time in history one of the key organs of a democratic state of law.” The conservative members reject this argument and argue that the progressives could have named the female judge María Luisa Balaguer as president of the Constitutional Court instead of Cándido Conde-Pumpido.
The defense of a female candidate to preside over the Judicial Power Council has also been taken up by some associations, such as the Women Jurists Association, which considers this possibility “a crucial step towards a more just, balanced, equitable and representative world.”
What matters most is what happens closer to home. To make sure you don’t miss anything, subscribe.
KEEP READING
The next meeting of the Council has been set for next Monday, but then the discussion and debate will no longer be about the two candidates voted for so far but about the seven Supreme Court judges who were eligible for that post from the beginning: Esperanza Córdoba, Antonio del Moral, Ana Ferrer, Ángeles Huet, Carmen Lamela, Pablo Lucas and Pilar Teso. Although the law sets the decision of the presidency between three and seven days after the constitution of the new Council, and on Monday that deadline would have already been exceeded, other internal sources indicate that in reality this plenary session is a continuation of those organised on Tuesday and Wednesday, that is to say a mere extension and not a new plenary session.
While the Judicial Council was meeting, the last plenary session of this legislature in the Cortes was taking place in the Senate, precisely for the definitive ratification of the legal reform negotiated and agreed between the PP and PSOE that allowed the resolution of the deadlock in the renewal of the previous members of the Judicial Power, who had been extended for five and a half years due to the blockage of the Popular Party in order not to lose their influence in that body. The Senate endorsed these legal changes with 227 votes in favour of the PP and PSOE, six against and 11 abstentions. There were senators present in the chamber who did not vote, from parties that are usual allies of the Executive, who thus showed their rejection of this pact of the classic bipartisanship.
The Popular Party senator María José Pardo has highlighted the agreement, as happened when the debate took place in Congress, that the reform deepens the depoliticization of justice and the end of the revolving doors that she has blamed the PSOE for in these years of government and has also emphasized that with this “anomalous” pact the PP had managed to get the socialists to distance themselves from their usual “communist” and “independentist” partners. The representative of the PSOE, Marta Arocha, has highlighted the legal changes that reinforce the requirements for certain positions in courts and the Prosecutor’s Office. The Vox senator has insisted on the idea that the PP and PSOE thus perpetuate their power sharing. And some regular partners of the Executive, such as PNV, Geroa Bai, UPN, Compromís, Agrupación Herreña Independiente, Agrupación Socialista Gomera y Eivissa i Formentera al Senat, or ERC, BNG and EH Bildu have preferred to abstain or vote against, calling the reform insufficient. Vox and Junts have also joined the negative vote.
#tie #progressives #conservatives #elect #president #Judiciary #entrenched