Free justice was widely used last year in Catalonia. Detainees have the right to be defended by a lawyer in a trial, and in cases of people without resources, one is assigned ex officio. The lawyers signed up for the ex officio shift carried out 339,556 actions in 2022, a record figure that shows the return to full normality after the restrictions of the pandemic that fully affected the development of judicial activity. This is confirmed by the data provided by the Consell de l’Advocacia Catalana, which brings together the fourteen bar associations of Catalonia, which indicate that the activity registered an increase of 6% compared to the previous year, 2021.
Faced with this growing activity, the organization is asking the Department of Justice of the Generalitat for an improvement in the budget allocation to finance the service, whose remuneration for lawyers is an average of 177 euros per action. The president of the Consell, Encarna Orduna, defended the importance of the legal duty and the free justice system and claimed that “it must be valued by the administration, incorporating salary improvements for the professionals who provide this service.”
The organization has a calendar of negotiations open with the Ministry of Justice to resolve the claims to improve conditions. They demand an update of the remuneration system with the recovery of the CPI between 2010 and 2023 or the improvement of the situation of the guards to provide assistance to detainees or victims, among others. Orduna stated that there is “good harmony and a good predisposition” in the conversations with the department and stressed that the Consell de l’Advocacia “will continue working to ensure that in the next budgets of the Generalitat a decent staff is established that allows to attend the service of the office shift in a sufficient and reasonable manner”. The president of the council also promised to start a “round of meetings with all the groups with parliamentary representation to make everyone aware of the need for the next Generalitat budgets to increase investment in justice and in the ex officio turn ”, as he assured yesterday in a press conference.
Among the four main specialties, the most common actions were related to criminal law with 140,000 assistances, followed by assistance to detainees, with 97,488; those related to civil law accounted for 36,000 actions, and those of violence against women, 21,000. In the field of criminal law there are 4,436 affiliated lawyers, followed by that of attention to victims of sexist violence, with 2,948; the right of minors, with 2,331, and the right of foreigners, with 1,663.
In total, there are 6,393 lawyers from Catalan associations assigned to the ex officio shift, which represents 26.56% of the total number of practicing lawyers, half of whom belong to the Barcelona association. Public defenders have an average age between 42 and 55 years and most have been practicing their profession for 15 years.
