Pedro Sanchez attended at 12:00 p.m. last Friday, January 19, the event in which the Attorney General of the State, Álvaro García, promised his position in the Zarzuela palace. His head was somewhere else. She had just heard from the lips of the third vice president, Teresa Riberaa few words about the car judge Manuel García-Castellónwho returned thereamputate Carles Puigdemont and Marta Rovira that same morning in an alleged crime of terrorism in the cause of the Democratic Tsunami due to the street demonstrations of November 2019 against the sentence of the processes.
Felix Bolaños, Minister of Justice, who presided over the event, was also chewing on Ribera’s statements. The Bolaños’ efforts to tune bagpipes through his relationship with acting president of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) Vicente Guilarte, also on the spot, seemed to go to hell. As if the statements of Alberto Núñez Feijóoon Wednesday the 17th, against the Constitutional Court and its president, Cándido Conde-Pumpidofor the sentences handed down in which two rulings of Chamber II of the Supreme Court, which presides, were overturned Manuel Marchena -cases of Alberto Rodríguez and Bateragune, respectively- would not have made all the red lines of the delegitimization strategy of the guarantee court of the Popular Party.
The test of nine in force in the judicial and political information of this country, marked with what we have called the media-judicial union, has been fulfilled again in this week of the perfect judicial storm. That test consists of this: when the right attacks an institution or its president – the Constitutional Court case – it is normal. For the media of that union it is de facto not news; It’s what it takes. But when a senior government official insinuates, rather than affirms, doubts about a jurisdictional decision of a magistrate – the Ribera case – it is the end of Montesquieu’s division of powers. That is to say: it is the end of democracy.
War dirty
Conde-Pumpido has been the object of a dirty war for many years to prevent, most recently, his rise to the presidency of the TC, something that Nuñez Feijóo’s PP wanted to abort until the last minute in December 2023. It was not the sewers, term very in vogue in this country, those in charge of the task against Conde-Pumpido. He has been a dirty war, but very transparent through the reincarnation of the former crime syndicate of the eighties of the last century into a media-judicial syndicate.
Was José María Aznar who was in charge, in the division of labor of the campaign for the municipal and regional elections of May 28, 2023, who systematically attacked the TC and its progressive majority that his party was not able to abort. And this week, Núñez Feijóo accused Conde-Pumpido, -who, according to what he said, cannot preside over the TC because he was the attorney general of the State- to “impersonate” to the Supreme Court repeatedly by “correcting” sentences. The president of the PP does not even bother to explain why he attacks this correction, what are the legal reasons that he does not like, what consequences they may have.
Nothing of that. Don’t let Núñez Feijóo touch the lighthouse that illuminates him -directly or indirectly-, namely, Manuel Marchena, president of the Criminal Chamber or Second Chamber, who in turn after the two setbacks has let the members of the so-called media-judicial union know that there is unrest in the “Supreme Court.” In the Supreme Court? Or more precisely in Marchena?
Teresa Ribera, after responding to TVE about the amnesty, was asked at the end of the interview about the resolution of Judge García Castellón (known on Friday morning). “I think it is very important to respect a fundamental principle of coexistence and the Constitution such as the separation of powers and the exercise of power and responsibilities that correspond to each of us who are in charge of the institutions, including respect for the judicial power, to the judges and magistrates, he said, and added: “And that does not prevent us from seeing that there are some people who hold that responsibility of the judicial power who have a certain desire to always speak in the same direction and in a particularly opportune moment compared to what otherwise tend to be the pronouncements of other colleagues within the exercise of that judicial power, so I would be very cautious regarding the way this judge is ruling which, as I say, we are accustomed to leaning in this same direction, which obviously has a politically important implication and usually comes up at sensitive political moments.
Ribera also said that “the newspaper archive shows that he is always very correct in the dates and in the sensitivity of the dates where these statements appear. But evidently it is his task, must motivate, explain and, where appropriate, following the way in which the courts configure the instruction and their own opinion and pronouncement, it is appropriate to wait and see what happens”
The judicial world, faced with such an insinuation, collapsed – or collapsed as you prefer – and pushed Teresa Ribera to the stake. The CGPJ considered it a crime.
When Pedro Sánchez and Félix Bolaños left the Zarzuela Palace last Friday, they did not have time to transmit the news on their mobile phones. recommendation – order – not to continue with mentions of Judge García-Castellón.
Forms Conspiracy
To the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, the media asked him about the matter. His response was measured. Knowing how he usually expresses himself, it was obvious that he was holding back. “We, both in the Government and in the PSOE, “We have a lot of respect for the judiciary and its decisions,” and this “despite certain temporary decisions that attract attention.” He supported Ribera’s statements regarding these coincidences because “this case [Tsunami Democràtic] “It dates back to 2019 and it is striking that every time there is a public debate on these issues, a judge’s resolution is produced.”
But despite Sánchez’s order, there are increasingly more members of the new executive commission of the PSOE who disagree with the behavior they call “pacification” for which the Government has to “let go” certain judicial actions that suppose, they affirm, an interference of the judicial power in the legislative power. “Judges are independent and should be. But they must stick to their function. “When they don’t, as can be seen in the current political climate, politicians have to speak,” a socialist leader told this newspaper.
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“The judiciary is in rebellion. Now it is against the amnesty law,” he adds. It is using queries from the CGPJ portal, for example, to advertise forms on how to submit preliminary questions in relation to the amnesty law before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), or raise a question of unconstitutionality before the Constitutional Court&rdquor ;.
“It’s amazing. Prejudicial or unconstitutionality issues are not considered as an instrument for purifying the legal system to resolve jurisdictional doubts but rather as an organized plan to hinder the application of a legal norm”, says a magistrate who remains astonished at the “conspiracy of the forms” through the CGPJ email.