The Supreme Court has rejected the complaint filed by Podemos against the judge of the National Court, Manuel García Castellón, and the reinforcing magistrate of said court, Joaquín Gadea, for not appreciating indications of crimes of prevarication, revelation of secrets and/or or omission of the duty to prosecute crimes in relation to the reopening of an investigation into this political group and its leaders for alleged illegal financing.
The complainants denounced that Judge Manuel García Castellón agreed to reopen the investigation based on the statements of former Venezuelan military officer Hugo Armando Carvajal who intended to delay his extradition to the United States, according to the complaint. He also stated that the judicial resolution was based on information obtained illegally by police officials and that the purpose of the secrecy was to prevent them from exercising their rights while simultaneously leaking the content and results of the investigation proceedings.
The Criminal Chamber considers that the reported facts do not constitute the aforementioned crimes. Regarding the information provided by Carvajal, he states that the events were related to the purpose of the investigation that had been carried out in court for crimes of illegal financing of political parties, tax crime and money laundering, so in the face of this new information the judge was obliged to investigate and verify the veracity of the information transmitted to him. For the Chamber, the declaration of secrecy of the summary with which the Public Prosecutor’s Office was in agreement does not seem unjustified at that time either.
In the same way, the court rejects the defenselessness denounced by Podemos for the declaration of the summary secrecy since if the investigation continued – indicates the Chamber – the secrecy would have ended up being lifted.
The court recalls that the crime of judicial prevarication “also requires awareness of issuing a resolution with total departure from the principle of legality and the usual and admissible interpretations of law, the “deliberate intention to violate justice” and, in accordance with From the above and from a simple reading of the contested resolutions and those issued by the Criminal Chamber of the National Court, it is clear that said subjective element is not present.”
Regarding the crime of revealing secrets, the court points out that “it is evident that there were leaks from the investigation that were made public through certain media, but neither the complainant attributes them clearly and definitively to the defendants, nor There is no indication that this was the case.”
Regarding the crime of omission of the duty to prosecute crimes, the Chamber recalls that it is “a crime of pure omission in which the active subject is the authority or public official who has among his legal powers that of promoting “prosecution of crimes and those responsible.”
In his order, he emphasizes that “in our case, as the Prosecutor’s Office maintains, the objective jurisdiction to pursue these leaks did not correspond to the defendants, but to the Court that was competent due to the matter and the territory.”
