The Attorney General of the State, Álvaro García, continues to be dissatisfied with a part of the prosecutor’s career due to the lack of forcefulness when condemning the accusations of lawfare against prosecutors linked to the process and the direct attacks on these prosecutors. After about twenty prosecutors from the Supreme Court claimed support in the face of the situation, as did several boards of provincial prosecutors, what García did yesterday, along with the rest of the Fiscal Council, is to give protection to the members of the public prosecutor’s office who acted or are acting in all the procedures derived from the pro-independence process.
They had been claiming it for weeks. This agreement was signed yesterday unanimously after they all agreed to withdraw the terms recognition and support from the Council, as initially demanded by the conservative and majority Prosecutors Association. However, García did not have the same support to issue an institutional statement in view of recent events.
Fiscal Council sources explain that the majority of members refused to sign it due to the “tepidity” of the attorney general, because it does not refer to lawfare, that is to say, to an alleged judicial persecution of pro-independence leaders for their ideas, as maintained by Junts and ERC. The unrest in the judiciary came mainly from the agreement signed by the PSOE and the party of the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont in which mention was made of this persecution and the ban on convening commissions of inquiry in the Parliament was lifted what judges could be cited who have been questioned.
Finally, the institutional declaration has been made by the attorney general, with the signature of the two members of the body, and the support, even if they have not signed it, of the two members of the Unió Progressistade Fiscals. Council sources explained that the rest refused to sign the declaration due to the “lack of commitment” to justice in these moments of maximum tension.
In the statement, the attorney general shows “his support and defense to any prosecutor who could be disturbed in his duties, including, of course, any of the prosecutors who have intervened in the various cases related to the independence process of Catalonia “. Regarding the request of some members for García to speak about the accusations and insults of Junts spokeswoman Míriam Nogueras during the intervention in Congress, García recalled that deputies and senators “enjoy inviolability for the opinions expressed in the exercise of their functions”.
Regarding the proposal for an organic amnesty law, he warned again that a pronouncement or opinion of the Fiscal Council, as some members have proposed, “would go beyond the body’s legally assigned powers”. In his opinion, it would mean interfering with the powers of both a power of the State, such as the legislative power, as well as the powers that correspond to other organs of the fiscal ministry, which will later have to intervene in the eventual application of the norm”. The president of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), Vicente Guilarte, who does not show any lukewarmness in this matter, returned yesterday to the charge against Nogueras’ words. “We are not indecent. I would like not to hear it again, because these words showed an infinite contempt for the very dignity of people, and point to those who have done nothing but comply with the demands of the established constitutional order”, he insisted in the Forum Justice and Disability of the CGPJ.
Guilarte thanked the Spanish Government for its position against the presence of judges in commissions of inquiry, although he criticized the PSOE for signing the agreement with the mention of lawfare, which would have saved the current “tensions”.
“Please, don’t let us down, insist on the fair line, we will appreciate it”, he demanded.
