Next day the 10th begins the plenary session in the Congress of Deputies to debate the amendments to the entirety against the amnesty law presented by the Popular Party and Vox. According to parliamentary sources, the expectation is that the law will be approved in the lower house in the last days of January and then go through the Senate process for final approval.
A procedure that can take two months from which all the focus will turn on the judges and their reaction to a law that should free nearly 400 people from their criminal, administrative and accounting processes.
Junts, ERC and Sumar do not seem to be going to reduce their accusations of judicial war – lawfare – to the members of the judicial career, whom they directly accuse of having led a judicial persecution against pro-independence leaders for their political ideology. This battle will be fought in the investigative commissions created in Congress.
Both parliamentary and judicial sources assume that in the coming months the tension between the two powers of the State will increase.
Judges and magistrates feel victims of a direct attack on their independence. The institutional shock experienced in recent months, especially after the last general elections on July 23, has been unprecedented.
The agreement between PSOE and Junts for the investiture, where the socialist party implicitly assumes the thesis of the existence of lawfare defended by the independentists, put the entire judicial power on a war footing, with explicit and clear statements from the presidents of the main judicial bodies, including the Supreme Court itself.
The statements of various members of the Government, including President Sánchez, have not managed to stop the mistrust and the subsequent escalation of tension. The Minister of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Courts, Félix Bolaños, has tried in recent weeks to calm the waters with firm statements in defense of judicial independence. The Minister of the Interior and career judge, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, has done the same, who in an interview with La Vanguardia maintained that in Spain there is no case of lawfare, not even in the case known as the Democratic Tsunami for which pursues the former Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, for terrorism crimes that Manuel García-Castellón is investigating.
This is the tense and complex scenario in which justice will have to administer the Amnesty law and apply it to the person who has managed to circumvent it for the moment, the former president of the Generalitat. What happens with the former president will be closely linked to the stability of the legislature.
Once the parliamentary process of the amnesty law has passed, the next step will be the Constitutional Court. Their role will be decisive not only in establishing the constitutionality of the norm but also in how it should be applied. The most likely thing is that once the law comes into force, PP and Vox will present an appeal for unconstitutionality. Its resolution will take at least several months. In parallel, the different courts can present questions of unconstitutionality about the application of the law in specific cases. Especially relevant will be what the guarantee court decides in response to the appeal that the Supreme Court will surely present specifically on the application of the amnesty to the former president of the Generalitat, Carles Puigdemont.
In any case, the first thing that the plenary session chaired by the progressive Cándido Conde-Pumpido must resolve is whether these issues paralyze the application of the law, which would leave the amnesty suspended until the issue is resolved.
The pressure on the Court is unquestionable and, in fact, it already began to be felt from different political and media sectors before the law proposal was even presented in the Congress of Deputies. Currently the plenary session is divided into two fairly homogeneous blocks. The so-called progressive, made up of seven magistrates, compared to the conservative, with four. Of the first, Juan Carlos Campo has already announced that he is distancing himself from this matter because as Minister of Justice he was the one who signed the reports on the pardons of those convicted of sedition and in which he already ruled on the unconstitutionality of a possible amnesty. The recusal of two other magistrates, Conde-Pumpido and Laura Díez, is also being raised, yet to be resolved.
In this situation, it must be taken into account that if PSOE and PP reach an agreement to renew the CGPJ, in this agreement the popular ones could force the appointment of a TC magistrate that is pending and who should be proposed by the conservatives. If it happens, the debate within the body on the amnesty would be even more difficult.
And meanwhile, the Court still has on the table to resolve the appeal against the conviction by the ERE of Andalusia, as well as the appeals against the repeal of the crime of sedition and the embezzlement reform, as well as against the new Abortion law and the so-called Trans law
In the midst of this climate and almost against the odds, the PSOE and PP reached an agreement in principle to try to tackle the institutional crisis and announced that they were beginning negotiations again to unblock the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), which has been going on for more than of five years in office, double his term.
Since the appointment of its twenty members has to be approved by three-fifths of Parliament, the two major parties are obliged to reach an agreement unless the majorities for the election change, an option that cannot be ruled out.
Europe has warned, actively and passively, that this situation cannot continue any longer, but the formation of Alberto Núñez Feijóo has been established in the no case if there is no prior change in law for the way in which its members are elected.
The last meeting of the leaders of the two parties left open a possibility of consensus supervised by the European Commission that would act as a verifier. Sources of the judicial power trust in the agreement to recover the credibility and institutional prestige that has been eroded in recent years.
