Left, EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders with Spanish Justice Minister Félix Bolaños in Brussels on the 4th.OLIVIER HOSLET (EFE)
Brussels is considering the request of the Spanish government and the PP to mediate between them and prevent once and for all the renewal of the General Council of Justice (CGPJ), the governing body of all judges in Spain, which should have been carried out according to the Constitution five years ago . “The Spanish authorities have asked the Commission to facilitate discussions to advance the reform of the CGPJ,” confirmed a spokesman for the local government this Saturday. “We are considering this request,” he added. Last year, Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders offered to defuse the situation by traveling to Spain. The PP believes that Reynders, from Europe's liberal political family, is the “appropriate” and “appropriate” person to play this mediator role. The government has no objections, although it would not be offended that it is the liberal Vera Jourová, the European Commission's vice-president in charge of values and transparency.
In the same written reply to this newspaper, the European Commission recalls its position on the issue, in which it has already shown more than once signs of growing impatience with the non-renewal of the Spanish body: “For the Commission, the deficiency is.” “The appointment of “It is important to members of the CGPJ and is stated as a priority issue,” he explains. The EU executive body is urging “immediately after the renewal to launch a process to bring the appointment system in line with European standards to ensure that the independence of the judiciary is not jeopardized.” That is, the Commission's approach is to first renew the composition of the CGPJ with the current law and then amend the law for future renewals. Reynders urged earlier this month to use this procedure – first renewing the law, then changing the law – but added that he was open to other options if they were the result of an agreement between the PP and the PSOE.
Reynders tried to help defuse the situation as early as autumn 2022. He did it while taking advantage of a trip to Spain, but the government didn't see it clearly. The fact that the popular Esteban González Pons, then an MEP, discreetly met with him and no one from the PSOE before his visit was seen as a suspicious maneuver by Pedro Sánchez's board. This time it seems to be different, because on Friday it was the government president and opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo who presented this unusual mediation request to the European Commission.
For now, all that is known is that the plans of the Socialists and the People are available to the negotiators of both parties – the Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños, and González Pons, the PP's deputy secretary general in charge of institutional affairs us next week. At least that is the intention of the government, which wants to speed up the negotiations.
“There are no precedents”
Alberto Alemanno, Jean Monnet Professor of EU Law at the HEC Paris business school, points out that “the attempt to involve the Commission in domestic judicial reform is unprecedented.” “I consider it a delicate matter since the EU is not the guardian of the Spanish constitutional order. This is the work of the Spanish institutions,” he adds.
What influences the most is what happens next. So you don't miss anything, subscribe.
Subscribe to
Daniel Sarmiento, professor of EU law at the Complutense University of Madrid, also sees no precedent for this type of mediation. He defends that the community board plays “a more active and mediating role.” As highlighted in a recent article, he believes it is good for the municipal board to play a more “creative” role and not stick to a “sanctions approach” limited to the use of traditional mechanisms and checking compliance with the rules. He proposes this solution for a situation like the one in the Spanish case, because “when the opposition hijacks the institutional machinery of the judicial power of a Member State”, a phenomenon that has few precedents and instead acts with the traditional means of disposal The Union is ineffective.
However, diplomatic sources recall that, although the Commission does not call it mediation, it “frequently intervenes in national institutional issues such as regulatory authorities, statutes of national banks and judicial bodies of various kinds.” “Of course, in a legal and political sense, it is wrong to talk about mediation. But in the country reports in the European Semester and on other occasions, the Commission is increasingly addressing institutional issues,” they analyze.
Growing impatience
The General Council of the Judiciary is composed of 20 members: 12 judges and 8 jurists of recognized reputation, appointed by Congress and the Senate by a three-fifths majority (which is why the agreement between the PSOE and the PP is necessary). ). The peculiarity is that the 12 member judges are selected by the Cortes, but from a list of candidates previously drawn up by the professional judges themselves. The PP wants to change this electoral model so that judges elect judges directly and without the involvement of Parliament. and emphasizes that this is also the guideline of the European Commission: to change the electoral method in this sense.
If Reynders finally agrees to act as mediator, he can tell both parties in private what he has been saying publicly for years: that the renewal of the CGPJ is urgent and that once that happens, Spain must reform the appointment mechanism in this organ. The Belgian did this, for example, ceremoniously in the European Parliament in the debate on amnesty sponsored by the People's Party in the European Parliament on November 22nd. So much so that he devoted more time to the non-renewal of the CGPJ than to the amnesty law itself. He also personally communicated this to Bolaños during his visit to the Commissioner in Brussels eight days later.
The impatience of European officials with the CGPJ blockade situation is clearly visible in the EU's annual rule of law reports. In its last edition this summer, it called for an urgent renewal as its absence “affects the work of the Supreme Court and the judicial system as a whole”.
The report pointed to the fact that after five years in office, the CGPJ has limited powers and cannot make appointments, due to a legal change made by the coalition government in the last legislature to force the PP to sit and negotiate .
Limited time special offer
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_