The Supreme Court has dismissed the Association of Prosecutors’ (AF) challenge to the confirmation of the appointment of prosecutor Eduardo Esteban – who is a member of the Progressive Union of Prosecutors (UPF) – as head of the Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office. The AF, majority in the race and conservative in nature, believed that then-Attorney General Dolores Delgado had failed to uphold a ruling issued by the Supreme Court itself in April, annulling Eduardo Esteban’s first election since he hadn’t been motivated enough to do this.
The Association of Prosecutors argued that after the annulment of Esteban’s appointment — and calls for that appointment to be reconsidered and better justified for her merits — the Attorney General reaffirmed her confidence by sidestepping the considerations the Supreme Court set out in its judgment dated April had pronounced.
Now, the Supreme Court’s decision – for which Judge José Luis Requero acted as rapporteur – found that the former Attorney General appointed Prosecutor Eduardo Esteban on the basis of “the Attorney General’s wide powers to decide on the group of prosecutors through which he intends to to contribute to the implementation of a specific criminal policy within the framework of state action”, a scope that even allows a subpoena to be declared null and void if necessary.
The resolution understands that Delgado, who left office in July this year, did not escape the first Supreme Court ruling that failed to adequately appreciate the candidates’ specialty by showing once again his confidence in the chosen one prosecutor and that he continued to repeat his appointment with new arguments. Delgado reasoned that “adhering solely to the specialty criterion would limit the chamber prosecutors’ ability to change their specialty or area of expertise” and that “the Attorney General’s ability to seek relief toward specialty areas would condition the professional expectations of second-rate prosecutors who they could only promote by becoming “hyperspecialists”.
Delgado also stated that after reviewing the applications, he concluded that Esteban displayed “greater qualities of motivating and leading teams, organizing and executing projects, taking direct responsibility, managerial capacity, and commitment.” And he added that to his discreet work in the Public Prosecutor’s Office, declaring that he was aware of his “exemplary conduct” at the service of the institution and “at the head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Province of Madrid”, adding that “this exemplary character showed itself , when he was relieved because his discretion facilitated the transition to a new model and leadership.” Delgado also defended his appointment because “one of the programmatic axes as Attorney General points to the gender perspective, and he has it in Mr. Eduardo Esteban during of his career in the Prosecutor’s Office before the Constitutional Court”, which was his previous determination.
In its order, the Supreme Court only criticizes the actions of the former Attorney General, who turned her reaction to the incident promoted by the Association of Prosecutors into an “accusation” as if by doing so she was appealing the verdict that marked Eduardo’s first appointment canceled Esteban as prosecutor for minors, who now “adds reasons that are already silly at this point in the proceedings”. In this sense, the resolution highlights that “the new proposal already includes justifications based on the characteristics of the position and compares the merits of the candidates”.
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