Several members of the conservative sector of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), whose mandate has expired for five years, have started preparing a report on the proposed amnesty law, with the aim of publishing it in the coming weeks. while it is being considered in the House of Representatives.
The initiative is due to the fact that the Senate Executive Board, with an absolute majority of the PP, decided on the 5th to ask both the governing body of judges and the Finance Council for their opinion on the bill presented by the Socialist Group.
The Senate's application has already been received by the Judicial Council, which will appoint the rapporteur(s) for the future statement in the coming days. In fact, some members of the Conservative sector had already started preparing the report. Eight of the 17 members of the current CGPJ, all elected on the proposal of the PP, began weeks ago a strategy of repeated attacks on the government over the agreements reached between the PSOE and the junts to facilitate the inauguration of Pedro Sánchez.
These agreements included the presentation of the amnesty law proposal in favor of almost 400 defendants in the Catalan independence trial, including former President Carles Puigdemont. The legislative initiative begins its parliamentary journey on Tuesday with consideration of the proposal in Congress.
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The criteria imposed on the CGPJ, given its current conservative majority, will, according to various members, be very critical of the bill and call into question its constitutionality. On November 6, the conservative majority of the CGPJ supported a statement against the amnesty law, even before knowing its contents.
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This statement expressed the opinion that the pardon measure was not only “incompatible with the principle of the rule of law” but also “creates a political class that is legally irresponsible and remains unpunished for its crimes.” “By this unique law,” the statement reads, “the judgments rendered by the various courts would be annulled and this unique law would encroach on the powers vested exclusively in the courts (Article 117.3 of the Constitution).
The PP proposal to consult the General Council of Justice and the Finance Council on the amnesty law was also formulated in Congress, but the majority that PSOE and Sumar have in the lower house prevented the approval of the initiative.
Legislative proposals do not require reports from the General Council of Justice or the Council of State, which are mandatory (but not binding) for government bills submitted to the Cortes.
interference
Legal sources consulted by EL PAÍS indicate that the Senate's initiative to request a report on a bill from the CGPJ should be included as a possibility in the Rules of Procedure of the Upper House, but this is not the case. The PP did not include it in the amendment to the regulation adopted a few weeks ago to extend the processing of the amnesty for up to two months after its adoption in Congress.
The same sources indicate that the Senate's request at this point represents an interference in the work of Congress, which has not even started working on the bill, so it could happen that the CGPJ makes the report on a different text than to the one submitted by the Senate. The Senate will receive the proposal for action once it has been approved by Congress.
Members of the Judicial Council point out that the motion of the Senate, enforced by the absolute majority of the PP, represents the ideal scenario for the governing body of judges to once again make its voice heard in this matter, under parliamentary protection, although the sector would have to make its voice heard The Conservative prepared the report without the House of Representatives asking him to do so.
In the organization's last permanent commission, held last week, the conservatives tried to force a very tough stance against the investigative commissions set up in Congress to investigate police maneuvers against Catalan independents and spying on Generalitat leaders using the Pegasus program. The deputy chairman of the General Council of Justice, Vicente Guilarte, who was also elected at the time on the proposal of the PP, opposed the two representatives of the progressive sector to prevent this. In recent weeks, Guilarte has distanced himself from the conservative offensive of the judiciary and even warned that the council should be allowed to inappropriately interfere in the legislative power.
The PP has repeatedly denounced in the last electoral term that the coalition executive had used the route of legislative proposals through the PSOE and Podemos parties that form it in order to circumvent the report from the state's advisory bodies. The absolute majority of the PP in the Senate has now approved the request to approve the report, without this being required by law.
No renewal in sight
The final steps of the PP in the Senate, the approval of the request for the report and the intention of several members of the conservative sector to prepare it even if it had not been requested, are interpreted in sources from the government of the judges themselves The body is rather than Data viewed as creating a scenario in which it will be very difficult for the executive and opposition to agree on their positions on judicial policy in the short term.
In the Council, both in the conservative sector and in the progressive group, it is considered unlikely that significant progress will be made in the meeting proposed by President Pedro Sánchez with popular leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo before the end of the year.
The pessimism also extends to the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary, which continues to be debated with no solution in sight. The initiative of the interim President of the Judiciary, Vicente Guilarte, to facilitate this renewal has generated reservations in both sectors of the governing body of judges.
Guilarte's proposal, detailed in an article he published in EL PAÍS, is to deprive the General Council of Justice of the key powers for the appointment of judges and leave them in the hands of the hearing judges and high courts themselves. The government's president, Pedro Sánchez, even suggested that if there was no agreement with the PP, it could make a proposal to reform the justice law that would take into account Guilarte's ideas.
Both conservatives and progressives believe that the power to appoint senior officials in judicial bodies – such as the Supreme Court, the High Courts of the Autonomous Communities or the National Court – should remain in the hands of the General Council of the Judiciary. Members of both sectors consider that in no case should this function be left to a new body independent of the Council, a possibility that is being considered by the path already known as the Guilarte path to try to renew the governing body the judge to release.
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