“An analysis of the impact of the conflict, which facilitates the action for the recovery of the ordinary activity of the judicial office and the centers of destination.” Or put another way, so that it is understood: a crash plan, with extra budgetary allocation, to recover normalcy in the courts as soon as possible.
It is one of the points of the agreement between the Ministry of Justice and the lawyers of the administration of justice after the end of the historic strike carried out by the former judicial secretaries.
The lawyers of the administration of justice, judges, prosecutors and lawyers agree on one thing. “Without a well-studied and structured crash plan, the collapse caused by this stoppage in those offices will not be solved.” And they also share: “This will not be a matter of two months, which is how long the strike has lasted; to return to the point at which it was before the start of this strike, it will take at least one year of extra work”.
The two parties in dispute give themselves a margin of three months, reads the agreement signed on Tuesday, to design that crash plan. No concrete actions at the moment. But from the judicial universe, voices are already beginning to be heard with some proposals, such as paying overtime to officials, appointing trials in the afternoon, reinforcement with more personnel, dosing the notifications so as not to further collapse those offices or setting priorities in the payment of the more than a billion euros blocked in the accounts of the courts.
Many higher courts of justice have been preparing measures to alleviate the consequences of this strike as soon as possible for weeks. Some of these offices are designing, for example, new rules in the notification processes so that the deadlines do not run. Now, the worst thing that could happen to them is to receive an avalanche of notifications, added to the accumulated unresolved ones during these two months of strike.
Another priority in those courts that have already gotten to work is to immediately release pending payments, with special attention to those related to social or commercial processes. Efforts will also have to be made to guarantee the holding of all the indicated hearings and attention will have to be paid to possible suspensions in order to cancel them with enough time and thus be able to indicate other hearings in those gaps in the agenda.
The lawyers have never hidden, while the protest has lasted, the expensive invoice that this has charged among the citizens for each day of unemployment. Hence their strangeness, which they have not hidden either, due to the delay of the Ministry of Justice in responding to their claims. During these two months, around 400,000 trials have been suspended and 1,500 million euros have been blocked in the accounts of the courts.
“These figures would never have been reached – in offices already saturated with work – if Justice had reacted earlier,” criticize the organizers of this strike. Now, with the planned shock plan, the Government will have to face – in addition to the promised increase of up to 450 gross euros in the monthly payroll of these lawyers – “a new budget item”, predict these sources. We will see how this plan is designed, although for some legal operators it is still shocking that those secretaries, whose unemployment has caused this situation, are going to collect in the future, with their office colleagues, overtime to reduce the collapse.
The Ministry of Justice and the communities that have transferred the powers in this field must mark the path to follow in the coming days. With the trials suspended, most of them have been scheduled again for several months to come, so the damage caused to citizens on this front is already irreparable. And the first week of April the impact of this strike will be known, with real numbers, with the statistics of judicial activity for the first three months of the year.
