Troubled waters in the Judiciary. A group of five members have denounced through a private vote the first decision carried out by the new interim president, Vicente Guilarte: the remodeling of the Permanent Commission, the most important governing body of the judges. This time the Judiciary has not split in two between conservatives and progressives, since the signatories belong to both sectors. What unites four of the five members who have faced Guilarte is that they have been affected by the renewal of the commission that requires exclusive dedication, in exchange for a gross annual salary of about 125,000 euros.
The individual vote against the reorganization of the Permanent and Disciplinary Commissions of the CGPJ is signed by the progressives Álvaro Cuesta and Clara Martínez de Careaga and the conservatives Juan Martínez Moya, Juan Manuel Fernández and Nuria Díaz Abad. The interim president, who took office after the retirement of Rafael Mozo last week, after taking office remodeled these departments, removing Cuesta, Martínez Moya, Fernández and Díaz from the Permanent Commission. In its place it included the progressives Roser Bach and Mar Cabrejas and the conservatives Carmen Llombart and Ángeles Carmona.
What the signatories denounce is that the remodeling was not on the agenda, so no one was consulted on this aspect. According to this group of members, Guilarte has not respected “due clarity and transparency” by not “expressly” including the renewal on the agenda by providing the necessary documents so that the plenary as a whole could study the matter in advance. According to his thesis, the remodeling “manifestly contrary to Law”, for which they have warned that it could affect the validity of the decisions they adopt.
“None of this happened,” they say. “The members who signed this particular vote were not even previously consulted about our opinion or preferences, as was done on previous occasions,” they criticize. “What’s more”, they add that “during the plenary session there were members who, having no legal limitation to participate in other commissions, expressed their desire to be assigned to another commission other than the one to which they had been assigned, without this issue being submitted to any debate, omitting dialogue and imposing the proposal”.
Conservatives and progressives, united by their exclusion from the Permanent Commission, also take advantage of the individual vote to criticize the “extravagant dissociation” that has been made “between the figure of the substitute president and that of the member of the Permanent Commission”, since the former He always heads this department that is in charge of making day-to-day decisions within the governing body of judges.
