The Ministry of Justice sent last Monday to the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) to force a pronouncement in protest of legal reforms in matters of justice promoted by the Government. In the brief, to which the country has had access, the department directed by Félix Bolaños asks the Council if he maintains the position he set in 2009, when the Plenary, then chaired by Carlos Dívar, agreed that the law does not provide for the right of strike of the judges and magistrates and had the strike that several associations and territorial assemblies had not convened. The letter sent by Justice also urges the government body of the judges to take measures to ensure that the proportional part of the salary is discounted to the judges that support the strike. The president of the CGPJ, Isabel Perelló, has summoned for this Thursday an extraordinary plenary to try to combine a position.
The strike call has departed from five associations of judges and prosecutors (all but progressives) in protest for the government: the one that provides changes in the form of access to both careers and the one that modifies the statute that regulates the Prosecutor’s Office to adapt it to the law that will leave the instruction of the criminal cases to the prosecutors.
The debate on whether the judges have the right or not to stop the council for weeks, but the letter sent by Justice has brought him to pronounce. Progressive and conservative blocks maintain opposite criteria: the majority of the progressive group considers that the members of the judicial career, as members of one of the powers of the State, have no right to strike; While conservatives consider that this group can strike because this is a constitutional right that can only be limited by law, something that has not happened in this case.
However, there is a point where both groups coincide: the CGPJ has no powers to decide whether judges can strike and, therefore, they cannot establish the minimum services, an indispensable requirement in any strike of essential services. If the consensus at this point is confirmed, the Council would collide with the Ministry of Justice, which in the letter sent to the body that Perelló chairs warns you that, in case it considers that the strike is legal, it must transfer “the minimum services that it establishes”.
The possibility of discounting the judges to strike the proportional part of the salary is another of the doubts that arise around this call. Justice – which pays the payrolls of the judges and prosecutors – who seconded a strike, but the National Court, when studying the appeal of a judge who challenged that decision, considered that the ministry is not “competent” to detract the money and forced to return the discounted. Sources of the convening associations ensure that this sentence does not mean that the strike this time is going to leave for free. The hearing, according to these sources, annulled the measure of justice for a “formal” issue to understand that the ministry has no powers to control the fulfillment of the day by the judges in order to verify if they had a strike, but that it had to have asked for that information to the CGPJ.
After this sentence, the doubt about how to detract the proportional part of the salary remains on the table. The majority of the conservative block, in their internal conversations of recent days, has considered that neither the Ministry nor the CGPJ have powers for the setting of minimal services nor for the deduction of assets, since the right to strike of the judges is not regulated by law, according to support sources of this group. That is, according to conservatives, judges have the right to strike because no law says otherwise, but no one is competent to discount the proportional part of the salary.
In the letter sent to the Council, Justice realizes that they will not let those who support the strike do it without economic prejudice. The trade, signed by the general director for the Public Justice of Justice, Verónica Ollé, requires the CGPJ to take measures in this sense whatever the position that sets on the legality of the strike. In the event that they consider that the judges have the right to do it, the Government urges the Council to facilitate “the list of people who support the strike daily before 14:00 hours of each day of strike called, for the purposes of carrying out the detraction of corresponding assets”; And if the governing body considers that this right does not exist for judges and magistrates, justice warns that “it must adopt the corresponding measures in order to also detract the assets corresponding to those people, given the eventual responsibility in which the CGPJ or this management center for the payment of the salary with public money to whom the provision of the service voluntarily and without a justified cause” could be given.
