Eduardo González
The European Commission has again insisted that Spain must renew the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) and “initiate, immediately after the renewal, a process in view of adapting the appointment of its judges-members, taking into account European standards on Councils for the Judiciary.”
This is stated in the fourth annual report on the rule of law, issued last Wednesday by the Commission, which takes the pulse of the rule of law situation in each Member State. In its previous report, published in July 2022, Brussels urged Spain to renew the CGPJ “as a matter of priority” and to undertake “immediate” reform of the system for appointing its members “taking into account European standards”.
One year on from that report, the 2023 document warns that “the situation of the Council for the Judiciary raises serious concerns as, firstly, the Council has not been renewed in spite of the urgency and, secondly, no steps have been taken to adapt the appointment procedure for its judges-members.” It also indicates that “the lack of renewal is having an impact on the work of the Supreme Court and the justice system as a whole, raising concerns in relation to the number of cases adjudicated by the Supreme Court and its length of proceedings”.
Furthermore, the report recalls “the commitments made under the national Recovery and Resilience Plan relating to certain aspects of the justice system” and, therefore, recommends that Spain proceed with “the renewal of the Council for the Judiciary as a matter of priority and initiate, immediately after the renewal, a process in view of adapting the appointment of its judges-members, taking into account European standards on Councils for the Judiciary”.
The same recommendations as a year ago
The report does nothing but insist on the same recommendations that, time and again, Brussels has issued regarding this dispute in the Spanish judiciary. For example, the European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, once again asked last May in Madrid, during an event presided by the King and attended by the Minister of Justice, Pilar Llop, that Spain address “the renewal of the CGPJ as a priority issue”, and initiate, “immediately afterwards, the process to adapt the appointment of its judges to European standards”. At the same event, the Commissioner warned that “it would be positive to implement this recommendation before the start of the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council in July”. The Spanish Presidency began last Saturday.
Reynders also warned that the Commission maintains a “dual approach” based, on the one hand, on dialogue with the State concerned, something that “unfortunately does not always bring results”, and, on the other hand, on “decisive actions”. Among the latter, he continued, are the launching of “infringement procedures (as was done with Poland in 2022)” and, “ultimately, recourse to the EU Court of Justice”. Besides, he recalled, Brussels has new instruments for these cases, such as the conditionality of funds for recovery plans, as it did with Hungary also last year.
The CGPJ has been in office since December 2018 because of the inability of the PP and PSOE to reach an agreement that would allow the renewal of the memberships, a situation that has obviously been further complicated by the Government’s decision to bring forward the general elections to next July 23, in the middle of the Spanish Presidency of the EU. The blocking of the renewal of the Council is preventing the appointment of magistrates to high courts, such as the Supreme Court. Brussels’ position clashes with that of the Popular Party, which has called for both the renewal of the Council and the reform of the system to be carried out at the same time.
European standards establish that the political power should not intervene in the election of the members-judges of the Council. The CGPJ has twelve members of judicial origin (out of a total of twenty) who are ultimately elected by the Congress and the Senate.
The Commission has constantly insisted on the need for the Council to be composed, for the most part, of judges elected by judges, as opposed to a minority of members appointed by Parliament and political parties. Both in the first evaluation report, of September 2020, and in the second, of July 2021, the Commission called for a “structural reform” of the election system of the CGPJ so that at least 50% of the members are appointed by the judges themselves, and not by the Parliament (as has been the case so far), “in line with European standards”.
The main objective of Brussels is for Spain to have a system that is “stable in the long term and resilient against political pressures after elections”, because, in the words of the Vice-President and Commissioner for Values and Transparency of the European Commission, Vera Jourová, “after elections, sometimes those who have won believe that they have the mandate to influence the Judiciary, and this is a mistake”.
