The president of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), Siofra O’Leary, has warned today of the “political blockages” that prevent appointments of judges and members of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ).
In a lecture on the ECHR delivered at the Constitutional Court itself, O’Leary stressed that when blockages occur at the political level over the appointment of judges, “national and European courts may have to intervene in defense of both judicial independence and the good functioning of a democratic State of Law”.
The president of the European court mentioned a recent ruling in which the Constitutional Court was warned not to adequately argue why the appeal for protection of six judges who had proposed to be members of the General Council of the Judiciary was not admitted for processing.
The origin is that these six members of the Francisco de Vitoria association of judges appealed to the TC for violation of their rights because Parliament had not even initiated the procedures for the renewal of the CGPJ once the term of its five-year mandate had ended. But the guarantee court did not admit the appeal due to a deadline issue. The appeal is from October 2020 and the TC understood that it had to have been appealed up to three months after the end of the CGPJ mandate, which was in December 2018, or in any case in December 2019, when the new Legislature was inaugurated.
So these six aspiring members went to the ECtHR for violation of two articles of the agreement, on the one hand due to the decision of the TC and on the other due to the blockade of Parliament.
He criticized that the TC dismissed the appeal by imposing a deadline that “was not foreseeable.” O’Leary herself recalled in today’s conference that it would have been “reasonable” to expect that a possible inadmissibility of the appeal for protection simply due to non-compliance with the legal deadline “would be accompanied by adequate motivation.”
The president of the ECtHR has said these words under the watchful eye of the president of the TC, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, and the rest of the magistrates that make up the guarantee body. Sources from the conservative sector have seen in these words a call of attention to the ruling handed down by the TC a few days ago in which the reform of the organic law of the judiciary has been endorsed to limit the functions of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ). ) while the mandate is extended.
That reform, approved in 2021, was promoted by the PSOE and Podemos to confront the PP’s blockade not to renew the body of judges.
Sources from the progressive majority who carried out this sentence have not seen it this way and believe that O’Leary was referring to the specific case of the six members regarding the blockade perpetuated for five years by the PP to not renew the body of judges. , in office since December 2018.
Conde Pumpido also spoke at the conference to highlight that Spain is one of the countries that receives the fewest convictions in Europe and he trusted that “this is how it should continue to be.”
In his speech, he defended Spain’s “firm commitment to the rule of law and international human rights regulations” to the point that “there is practically no Constitutional ruling that does not cite the rulings of the ECHR.”
