“Please lower the tension. Leave us alone.” The president of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), Vicente Guilarte, demanded yesterday from the political forces the cessation of hostilities surrounding justice.
He asked for it at the delivery of the 18th awards of the Observatory against Domestic and Gender Violence of the General Council of the Judicial Power, an event in which, among other political representatives, the Minister of Justice, Félix Bolaños, was also present.
After a week in which the allies of the Central Government, but also some of its adversaries, were heard to single out certain judges without objection, the President of the Council underlined the “devastating effect” of the “frequent and unjust attempts to delegitimization of the Judiciary”, sometimes starring “representatives of the public authorities to whom the ephemeral tribune at their disposal facilitates their diatribe”, as “we saw on Tuesday in Congress and the Senate”.
The pointing out of certain judges by the deputy of Junts, Miriam Nogueras, in Congress provoked the reaction of all the branches of the judicial power to the point that the president of the Supreme Court, Francisco Marín Castán, suspended the meeting he had planned with Félix Bolaños. The new Minister of Justice tried to calm spirits and, in fact, the meeting with the President of the Supreme Court will take place next Tuesday.
But the unanimous reaction of all the judicial institutions, including the Constitutional Court itself and all the professional organizations – conservative and progressive -, highlights the point of fatigue.
Guilarte, Acting President of the Council, explicitly asked the Central Government not to be complicit in the allegations: “No State power can be complicit in these campaigns either with their attitudes or with their silence”.
At another point in his speech, he warned that “no judge” can be summoned to testify in any commission of inquiry to justify his jurisdictional procedure. He thus responded to the eventual summoning of judges to the investigative commissions set up in Congress to find out if there has been lawfare in judicial proceedings against Catalan independence.
Vicente Guilarte pointed out that “starting this way would involve a clash that would be brutal between the powers of the State necessarily called to mutual respect, never to confrontation”.
Even so, in his intervention, Guilarte asked for restraint from the judges and magistrates, especially regarding the criticism of the amnesty law, mainly expressed by some of the judicial associations and from the conservative bloc of the body he presides over. “We also assume our neutrality, often distorted, since judicial independence is two-way: not to their interference in what is ours, but not to ours in what is theirs.”
“My call – concluded Guilarte – is once again to dilute the tension, to isolate ourselves from the political confrontation and to ask for an adequate renewal of the Judiciary”.
