At the request of eight members of the conservative majority, the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) is holding an extraordinary plenary session this afternoon to promote an institutional declaration against the future amnesty law of the process, the content of which is still unknown.
This preventive maneuver by the governing body of the judges, whose mandate has expired for five years, has already motivated Álvaro Cuesta, from the progressive sector, to request the cancellation of the meeting, requested by eight of the 16 members of the CGPJ on after day 1, considering that it is “manifestly illegal” and has announced that he will not attend.
Cuesta, in line with the progressive minority of the CGPJ, which sees in the call an “incitement to the uprising of the togas”, assures by letter that it does not want to contribute “to the indignity and discredit of the members elected by the Spanish Cortes in the year 2013 can be considered rebellious against initiatives of the Parliament legitimately elected on July 23, 2023.”
Despite not knowing the text of the bill, the interim president of the CGPJ, Vicente Guilarte, accepted this initiative against the amnesty, a “measure to abolish the rule of law” that “violates the Constitution” and turns justice into “a chimera”, according to the vocalists who promote it.
Elected as a member in 2013 at the proposal of the PSOE, a party to which he joined in 1974, Cuesta maintains that the declaration that the CGPJ intends to approve is a “political pamphlet” that “consists of very serious disqualifications” against the president of the Government and the political agreements for the sake of his investiture.
Therefore, in addition to stating that a resolution of this type from the CGPJ would usurp oversight powers that do not correspond to it, he argues that it would be “a very serious irresponsibility” that will accentuate “political tension” and trigger “social alarm”, which could lead to “attacks on democratic institutions” and even “public disorders.”
Likewise, Cuesta recalls that the CGPJ does not have the authority to issue statements on legislative proposals, unless Congress has requested it, and insists that the convening of the plenary session is “inadmissible and illegal.”
With this absence in the progressive minority, which has six members, the conservative majority will be even larger in the CGPJ, so presumably an institutional declaration will be approved that expresses the body's “intense concern and desolation” over the amnesty law. , as its promoters explained in a statement.
However, the question of the vote of Guilarte himself and Wenceslao Olea, aligned with the conservative wing but who did not subscribe to the request to call the plenary session, which according to some voices, could choose to abstain, remains unclear.
On the other hand, yesterday it emerged that the head of the court of first instance number 104 of Madrid who agreed to study the request for precautionary measures from a citizen to paralyze the parliamentary processing of the amnesty before that law even exists, José Ramón Manzanares Codesal, He was pardoned by the government of José María Aznar in 2004 after being removed from the judicial career for prevarication.
