The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) yesterday issued a warning to the Constitutional Court (TC) for not having adequately argued why the protection appeal of six magistrates who had proposed to be members of the General Council of the Judiciary.
The origin of the Strasbourg decision is an appeal by six members of the association of judges Francisco de Vitoria to the TC for violation of their rights because the Parliament had not even started the procedures to renew the CGPJ once the term had ended of his five-year term.
But the guarantee court did not admit their appeal due to a matter of deadlines. The appeal was from October 2020 and the TC understood that it should have been made up to three months after the end of the CGPJ’s mandate, which was December 2018, or in any case December 2019, inaugurated the new legislature.
So these six aspiring members appealed to the ECtHR for violation of two articles of the agreement. On the one hand, because of the decision of the TC, and, on the other, because of the blockade of Parliament. The Strasbourg court does not go into assessing the second part because it considers that to the extent that the TC did not want to admit the appeal to the procedure, it cannot go into the merits.
In a ruling yesterday, the ECtHR detected a “lack of justification” by the TC in its decision despite the “obvious importance, apparent novelty or legal rarity of the aspects” raised by the complainants. In particular, he criticizes the dismissal of the appeal by imposing a deadline that “was not foreseeable”.
Therefore, Strasbourg concludes that his right to a fair trial has been violated. However, the ECtHR does not assess the controversy over the blockage in the renewal of the Spanish Judiciary.
Strasbourg limits itself to verifying the violation of its right to access a court, although it recognizes that the case is “closely linked to guaranteeing respect for the legal procedure for renewing the composition of the governing body of the Judiciary and proper functioning of the justice system”.
The European court clarifies that in this case the right of the six magistrates to be appointed members of the CGPJ is not analyzed, but rather their right to have the TC study the matter, which was based on the blocking of the body of judges by part of the Spanish Parliament due to the lack of agreement between the two main parties, the PSOE and the PP. In addition, what they demanded from the TC was their right for Parliament to study the candidacies in a timely manner.
In this context, the ECtHR points out that “it would have been reasonable to expect that the dismissal of his protection appeal would have been motivated”.
However, according to the court, the Spanish Constitutional Court did not give “even the most basic of explanations to justify the two dates (December 4, 2018 and December 4, 2019) to which it had referred” when it rejected the admission to the appeal process.
The judgment of the European court has a concurring vote from magistrate María Elósegui, who is critical of the lack of renewal of the body of judges. “Preventing the renewal of the CGPJ for four years due to a lack of agreement between the political parties and not proceeding to include the approved list of candidates in the agenda for its vote in Parliament represents an unprecedented blockage in the last 48 years of democracy in Spain”, says the only Spanish representative in this court.
