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Standoff over judicial appointments may be over but Spain’s justice system still faces huge challenge

An increasingly toxic political arena has fuelled the sense of crisis in the judiciary

Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez and his wife Begoña Gómez, who has been cited to appear in court on July 5th for a lawsuit relating to alleged corruption and influence peddling even though a state prosecutor called for the case to be shelved for lack of evidence and a civil guard report said there had been no wrongdoing. Photograph: Juan Medina//Pool/AFP via Getty Images

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Guy Hedgecoe in Madrid
Sun Jun 30 2024 - 15:00

Spain’s two main parties have reached an agreement that ends a half-decade impasse over judicial appointments. It is, in theory, a triumph of consensus over party politics, yet this accord cannot hide the fact that the justice system is facing its biggest challenge of the democratic era.

The country’s judicial supervisory body, the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), had been awaiting new appointments since late 2018. The council appoints senior judges, including to the constitutional and supreme courts, as well as to regional high courts. Its members are selected by a three-fifths parliamentary majority, which the country’s fragmented politics had made impossible to form.

The standoff, between prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialists and the conservative Popular Party (PP), had meant that in the supreme court alone, 26 out of 79 positions had become vacant, due to the retirement or death of magistrates.

Vicente Guilarte, the acting president of the CGPJ, welcomed the deal, which will see the Socialists and the PP each nominate 10 magistrates to the supervisory body, describing it as “an agreement between two very politicised political forces”.

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So far apart were the two parties that the mediation of European Commission vice-president Vera Jourová was required to close the deal in Brussels.

The commentator Enric Juliana noted that requesting the involvement of EU officials in a national dispute would be unthinkable for most other countries in the bloc. “Without the bridle of European political culture, this country would have ended up in problems again,” he said.

And yet, the weaknesses associated with Spain’s judiciary are far from resolved: “We have managed to make the appointments and now progress has to be made in fully depoliticising the justice system,” Guilarte said.

The constitution that followed the end of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco limited political involvement in the appointment of the CGPJ. But in 1985, the Socialist prime minister, Felipe González, fearful that deeply conservative judges from the Franco era were overly represented, introduced the system in place today.

As a result, the Socialists and the PP compete to control the CGPJ, guaranteeing its politicisation. The five-year deadlock that recently ended was caused by the conservatives’ refusal to cede influence to the governing Socialists and it has contributed to an erosion of faith in the justice system. An EU report from last year showed that 56 per cent of Spaniards see the judiciary’s independence as “fairly bad” or “very bad” (only 16 per cent of Irish had that opinion of their own judicial system).

An increasingly toxic political arena has also fuelled the sense of crisis in the judiciary.

The Sánchez government’s Catalan amnesty law, which seeks to lift pending legal action against hundreds of nationalists for separatist activity, has been part of this phenomenon.

Many judges and jurists have supported the opposition line that the measure is unconstitutional. Although the amnesty is now starting to be applied, it is still unclear whether it will benefit, for example, the former Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, who has been living abroad to avoid prosecution. Among the obstacles to his right to amnesty have been new accusations of high treason brought by a judge against him for alleged contacts with Russia during the 2017 failed independence bid that he led.

[ Former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont preaches independence from self-exile  ]

For Puigdemont’s lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, the allegation is an “arbitrary and aberrant interpretation” of the law, aimed purely at ensuring his client is excluded from the amnesty.

This situation has echoes of 2019, when the supreme court gave nine Catalan leaders prison terms of up to 13 years for their role in the 2017 secession drive. The perceived injustice of those sentences triggered violent scenes on the streets of Barcelona and cemented, in the minds of many nationalist Catalans, the notion that the Spanish judiciary was controlled by vindictive magistrates who wore their conservative, unionist views on the sleeves of their togas.

Politicians from the hard-left Podemos, which has appeared to be the target of a judicial smear campaign orchestrated by politicians and police officers – have expressed similar views. More recently, members of Sánchez’s government have voiced misgivings about the judiciary due to alleged cases of so-called “lawfare”, the use of legal action as a political weapon.

The most notable of these has been a lawsuit brought against Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, for alleged corruption and influence peddling, by a far-right campaign group. A state prosecutor called for the case to be shelved for lack of evidence and a Civil Guard report said there had been no wrongdoing. However, Gómez has been cited to appear in court on July 5th, a decision, announced by the investigating judge just days before the EU elections, Sánchez himself queried and described as “strange”.

Such language causes Sánchez’s enemies to accuse him of autocracy and the acting CGPJ warned the prime minister that his words could contribute to “the deterioration of institutions”.

Much of Spain’s left, as well as Catalan and Basque nationalism, believes the judiciary has caused its own deterioration. The agreement between Socialists and conservatives over CGPJ appointments may have closed one cause of aggravation surrounding the justice system. But plenty more remain.

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