King Felipe VI (center) with the President of the European Court of Human Rights, the Irish Siofra O’Leary (left) and the President of the Constitutional Court, Cándido Conde-Pumpido (right), during their meeting Thursday at the Zarzuela Palace.ZIPI (EFE)
The President of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), Siofra O’Leary, defended this Thursday the intervention of the European judiciary “when there are blockages at the political level in the appointment of judges”. O’Leary made this statement while reviewing some of the most significant cases in which the Strasbourg Court has corrected decisions made by the Spanish judicial system. The President of the ECtHR referred to the judgment of this court, which found that the Spanish Constitutional Court had violated the European Convention on Human Rights by rejecting a protection appeal from six Spanish judges due to the lack of renewal of the General Council of Justice (CGPJ).
The Strasbourg court considered that the Spanish Constitutional Court had limited itself to rejecting the application for protection of these judges on the grounds that they had lodged their appeal out of time, but had not provided “appropriate reasons” for this decision. Given that she was giving her presentation to the Spanish Guarantee Court herself, O’Leary added: “I don’t want to be inappropriate to my hosts by mentioning this case,” which “reminds us that there are difficulties in organizing “The judiciary and the justice system can manifest themselves in different ways in many European countries. But the same case – he continued – also illustrates that “when blockages arise at the political level regarding the appointment of judges, national and European courts may have to intervene in order to protect both the independence of the judiciary and the proper functioning of a democratic State to defend the law.”
O’Leary, who was defeated by Felipe VI before her intervention. in the company of Cándido Conde-Pumpido, President of the Constitutional Court, referred to the same issue elsewhere in their conference, stating that the European Convention on Human Rights “lays down in relation to a wide range of subjects, including “the organization of judicial systems” , no uniform rules established across Europe. In any case, with regard to the request for protection of six judges of the Francisco de Vitoria Judicial Association (AJFV) in defense of candidates for membership of the Judicial Council, he stated that the Strasbourg court had found in this matter “a violation of the Convention.” [Europeo de Derechos Humanos]” considering that there was no “repeated case law on the calculation of the legal time limit that would have been foreseeably applicable to the plaintiffs’ case”. On the other hand, the appeal of these judges before the Strasbourg court was successful because in Spain the Constitutional Court was “the only competent authority” that could have known precisely “the situation denounced by the plaintiffs”.
The President of the ECtHR described this matter as significant with regard to Spain, pointing to the more than 26,000 judgments that the court has issued in more than 60 years and in which it has resolved more than a million claims. In his conclusions, O’Leary also referred to the fact that over all these decades the Strasbourg court “has played a crucial role in preserving and protecting the common European values of pluralist democracy.” But he also left a cautionary message, declaring that “the strength and stability of our institutions is essential to the preservation of our way of life” when “Spain, in addition to the centrifugal forces that affect all of us in Europe, is dealing with its own internal ones “Challenges.”
O’Leary noted at the reception afterwards that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) was aware of the “implications” of the appeals against the trial verdict. He did not give any dates for a possible solution, but said that the Strasbourg court was fully aware of the relevance and interest of the case. On September 22, the ECtHR asked the Spanish state to answer six questions by January 12, 2024. Among other things, the ECtHR asked whether the Supreme Court’s ruling constituted an “unforeseeable or far-reaching interpretation of the crime of sedition and/or embezzlement” in “violation of Article 7 of the Convention”, an allegation that was one of the focuses of the appeal in Procés -Verdict convict is. This article states: “No person shall be convicted for any act or omission which, at the time of its commission, did not constitute a violation of national or international law.”
In another section of his conference, O’Leary referred to the consequences of the war in Ukraine as a particular challenge for European justice and explained that the ECtHR had accumulated 15,000 cases against the Russian Federation. He added that the Strasbourg court “is currently the only international court examining the merits of the events that occurred in Ukraine from 2014 until the invasion in February 2022.” Siofra O’Leary also stated that “the “The war in Ukraine has redefined Europe’s legal and political boundaries and dramatically changed its security structure.”
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