Free justice was widely used last year in Catalonia. Detainees have the right to be defended by a lawyer in a trial and in cases of people without resources they are assigned one ex officio. The lawyers listed on the official shift made 339,556 actions in 2022, a record number that shows the return to full normality after the restrictions of the pandemic that fully affected the development of judicial activity. This is confirmed by the data provided by the Consell de l'Advocacia Catalana which brings together the fourteen bar associations of Catalonia, which indicate that the activity registered an increase of 6% compared to the previous year, in 2021 .
In view of this growing activity, the organization is demanding from the Department of Justice of the Generalitat an improvement in the budget allocation to finance a service in which the average remuneration is 177 euros per action. The president of the Council, Encarna Orduna, defended the importance of the duty shift and the free justice system and claimed that "it must be valued by the Administration, it is necessary to incorporate improvements in remuneration for the professionals who provide this service ".
The organization has an open schedule of negotiations with the Ministry of Justice to resolve claims for improved conditions. They demand an update of the remuneration system with the recovery of the IPC between the years 2010 and 2023 or the improvement of the situation of the guards to provide assistance to arrested persons or victims, among others. Orduna stated that there is "good harmony and good predisposition" in the talks with the department and stressed that the Bar Council "will continue to work to ensure that in the next budgets of the Generalitat a decent allocation is established that allows attend to the duty shift service in a sufficient and reasonable manner”. The president of the Council also committed to start a "round of meetings with all the groups with parliamentary representation in order to make everyone aware of the need for increased investment in justice and in the Generalitat's next budgets office shift", he assured yesterday in a press conference.
Among the four main specialties, the most common actions were related to criminal law with 140,000 assistances, followed by assistance to detainees, with 97,488; those relating to civil law amounted to 36,000 actions, and those relating to violence against women were 21,000. In the area of criminal law, there are 4,436 registered lawyers; followed by care for victims of male violence, with 2,948; the law of minors, with 2,331, and the law of foreigners, with 1,663.
In total, there are 6,393 lawyers from Catalan associations registered on the official roll, which represents 26.56% of the total practicing lawyers, half of them belong to the Barcelona association. Professional lawyers have an average age of between 42 and 55 years and most have been practicing their profession for 15 years.
