The president of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) and of the Supreme Court, Carlos Lesmeshas announced that this Monday he will present his resignation, given the inability of the two major parties, the PSOE and the PP, to renew this body, which is about to serve four years in office, which shows an unprecedented institutional crisis.
The decision, made public on Sunday night by the Council, comes after the precarious situation of the governing body of the judges –limited in its functions after the latest legal reforms – and the division between blocks has led to the failure of another renewal, that of the Constitutional Court, which must replace four of its magistrates because their mandates expired on June 12. Two of them must be designated by the members of the CGPJ, who should have reached a consensus to choose the names before last September 13 in compliance with a recent legal reform.
The vitiated atmosphere that the lack of political agreement has transferred to the Council has prevented agreement, placing the president in a difficult situation. Lesmes expressed his willingness to leave the organ once the members completed their legal assignmentsomething that has been impossible until now.
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The resignation, which will be effective once the corresponding royal decree is published in the Official State Gazette, occurs once this Sunday the term that Lesmes himself announced to the members of the Council in the plenary meeting on September 29, without any of the conditions that could prevent it: that there had been some rapprochement between the PP and PSOE or that the appointment functions had been returned to the CGPJ.
Lesmes has announced that he has decided to cease immediately in the functions that legally correspond to him at the head of the Judiciary in a video, in which he explains that after the call he made during the judicial year opening speech to the President of the Government and the leader of the opposition so that they put a definitive solution to the untenable situation in which the Supreme Court and the CGPJ find themselves and of the exhortations in the same sense made by the Justice Commissioner of the European Union, Didier Reynders, who visited Spain last week, “the contacts developed in recent days”, of which he has been informed, have not given any positive result.