The State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, sees a “reversal of roles of the rule of law” in the alleged investigation of the former top prosecutor of Catalonia Martín Rodríguez Sol by the Ministry of the Interior when it was directed by Jorge Fernández Díaz and revealed by La Vanguardia and Eldiario.es last week. That is why the Prosecutor’s Office took action on the matter last Monday and opened proceedings to clarify the issue after learning of this information.
“It is serious that the person who has the obligation and duty to investigate, which are the prosecutors, the leadership of this territorial structure in the autonomous community of Catalonia is the one investigated without being informed of it nor there being any cause or obligation to do so; “It is the absolute reversal of roles in a rule of law,” García Ortiz considered in an interview on TVE this Thursday, the day after taking office as attorney general.
“The prosecutors are not investigated, it is the prosecutors who investigate,” insisted García Ortiz, for whom “this change of roles endangered at the time the entire structure of a rule of law.” However, the prosecutor has avoided specifying details about the proceedings and has warned that the classification of the crimes is “premature.”
García Ortiz has also taken advantage of the interview to attack the General Council of the Judiciary, which at the end of November refused to endorse his suitability after being appointed by the recently formed Government. After emphasizing that it was a report by eight of the members of the CGPJ that has not been renewed for five years, the prosecutor reproached them for “expressing an opinion without being competent, exceeding their competence.” And he reminded them that what they should do is “decide on whether the attorney general is a jurist of recognized prestige with more than 15 years of practice, a question about which there is no doubt.”
“The suitability of the attorney general corresponds to the Justice Commission of the Cortes,” said García Ortiz, in whose opinion “those statements and value judgments discredit those who praise them more than the attorney general himself.”
The attorney general has also rejected that the Fiscal Council has powers to prepare a report on the Amnesty law, the final text of which will be voted on in Congress next week, as requested by the president of the Senate, Pedro Rollán. “The Fiscal Council does not have powers to prepare a report on a proposed law,” García Ortiz has indicated. “Neither the organic statute of the fiscal ministry, nor the organic law nor the regulations of the Senate grant them, there are no precedents,” insisted the prosecutor who has announced that throughout today he will respond to the request of the Upper House in this regard.
“We should not do something that the law does not allow us to do,” stressed the attorney general, who has pointed out that to make a statement, prosecutors will have to wait until “they are required by the courts to do so.” At this point, the prosecutor has stressed that institutional prudence and rigor in the issuance of legal reports must be reserved for the procedural moment or the appropriate legal moment”, in a possible veiled allusion to the reports prepared by other State institutions such as the CGPJ itself on the law of criminal oblivion.
And asked about a possible statement by the Attorney General’s Office on the law, García Ortiz indicated that any statement by the attorney general before even knowing the text of a law “can mean a distortion in the legal debate.” “I want to escape from the role of commentator to go to the field that corresponds to the Prosecutor’s Office,” that is, to promote the action of justice before the courts, the prosecutor has concluded.