If the Government processes the amnesty law as a bill, the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) will be the guest stone in that legislative procedure. The Executive is obliged to obtain the report of the governing body of the judges if it is a draft law, but not if this legislative procedure is avoided, as it happened, without proceeding, with the reform endorsed by some days ago in the Constitutional. Court (TC) withdrawing the CGPJ’s power to make appointments while it is still in office. This Council report is not useful, but it includes – as happened with the “yes only means yes” law – possible legal opposition to the parliamentary initiative.
While waiting to know the content of the amnesty law in which Pedro Sánchez hopes to guarantee the favorable vote of the Catalan independence movement for his investiture, CGPJ sources made it clear that the institution is not ready to sit without can be in the face of what they consider the “violation of the principle of separation of powers.” Therefore, it is the intention of the consulted members to bring the future amnesty law to the Plenary so that their colleagues can speak.
To do this, it is necessary that the president of the Council, Vicente Guilarte, or at least five members, request its inclusion in the agenda (the next ordinary plenary session will not be held until the end of the month, before, according to of the Government. predictions, taking the investiture, although it may also call an extraordinary session to debate the issue).
The sources consulted believe that it is possible for five members to support the initiative to bring the amnesty law to the plenary session. Another very different matter – they thought – that the councilors finally agreed to make a joint resolution on this matter.
The Council will “respond or at least try”
“I believe that the CGPJ should speak,” point out the same sources, who nevertheless admit that it is “difficult” for an amnesty report to be approved, to which some members are opposed. “We are not here to tell the Government what to do,” they stressed in any case. “We also told him that the yes law is barbaric and he didn’t listen to us,” they recalled.
“When we have the text, this is the ideal moment,” explained another source in favor of the initiative, who also believes that it will be difficult to agree with the councilors: “I don’t think there is a majority ready to approve the report .” In any case, he is clear that “when the bill comes out, the Council will react, or at least try to.”
“It is impossible that the law will be constitutional,” said the same sources, warning that “we are in a period of constitutional mutation that began with the approval of Law 4/2021” (the reform that supports the back powers. to the CGPJ when its mandate has expired, a change that seeks to force the PP to negotiate the renewal of the Council, in office since 2018, and which has caused 84 unfilled vacancy accumulated in the judicial leadership).
“This is a violation of the separation of powers”
“The sentences handed down by the courts are left without effect and the powers of the Judiciary are irremediably invaded,” they complained while separating the measure from the pardon. “A pardon respects a sentence, but an amnesty does not: it takes away the punishment, commits the crime and even the possibility of trying it disappears,” they said.
“In the transition, ‘amnesty and freedom’ were shouted,” they recalled. “Amnesty is an expression of freedom and if amnesty is needed now, it is believed that in Spain, as in the time of Franco, neither freedom nor fundamental rights are respected.” This, they defend, is “nonsense” that means “destruction of the political transition” and “bankruptcy of the separation of powers” that they do not trust that the Constitutional Court will be able to stop it. “I really have no hope in the Constitutional Court,” they themselves resigned.
Precisely in the court of guarantees, there is a dead calm waiting for the nest of the window which means that the institution should be predicted to rule the future law. “The best thing that can happen is that we do not have to decide on the constitutionality of the amnesty law because it is not approved,” acknowledge the sources of the TC, knowing that the appeals announced by the PP and Vox in one You can be a measure of Grace’s will. put the court led by Cándido Conde-Pumpido in the firing line.
