The progressive members of the General Council of the Judiciary have published a statement in which they affirm that its president, Isabel Perelló, has “consciously” broken the “consensus that had governed this first year” in the governing body of the judges after the renewal of the commissions that, in her opinion, have been “a blow to plural representation and a serious distortion of institutional collegiality.”
The members regret the way in which a press release from the CGPJ has been written with a version that they do not share of the renewals of the commissions, among which is the Permanent, a key body in the day-to-day life where – the Council note says – the initial balances between its members they “stay exactly the same”without variations. On the other hand, the progressives denounce that the balance has been broken because they have been “included and excluded from the different commissions, not only the permanent one, but also the remaining legal, regulatory and other delegations of the CGPJ”: “In some cases, against our express will, something that has not happened neither with (Hugo) Preciado nor with the conservative members whose will has been scrupulously respected,” they say. They also complain that this note “has not been agreed upon or endorsed in plenary session.”
The origin of the conflict is in the new composition of the different commissions in which the work of the body is organized. This composition was approved last Thursday with the votes of the conservative group, the president and one of the members chosen at the initiative of Sumar Carlos Hugo Preciado. With the new distribution, eight of the eleven commissions have a conservative majority. Among them, the most relevant, the Permanent, a kind of hard core where many important decisions are made. The progressives had a proposal that ended up being withdrawn. There was not even a vote.
These members have disagreed with maintaining this balance that the Judiciary defends by including the member Carlos Hugo Preciado, whom the conservatives place in the progressive quota, although his peers reject that he represents them because he has been acting as an independent for some time. “Among the ten members of progressive sensibility we soon saw that there was one who demanded individuality far above the rest, who unilaterally decided not to be part of the group. Nine members had the firm commitment to build a common project to share and debate with the conservative sector to, together, provide political content to this Council. The member Preciado decided not to share and go on his own,” said Argelia Queralt in an interview with elDiario.es.
Breakdown of trust
The statement from the progressive members, which is also signed by Judge José María Fernández Seijo – who had intended to resign while his bloc colleagues try to get him to reconsider – has denounced that the president of the CGPJ “has broken the basic conditions of trust that she herself had proclaimed at the beginning of her mandate.” “The possibilities of family conciliation and personal respect, which should have been pillars of the new Council, have been cut to the point of disappearing under a logic of exclusion and imposition,” he noted.
For the progressive sector, the “internal reorganization” of the CGPJ “is the conscious rupture of the consensus that had governed this first year, a blow to plural representation and a serious distortion of institutional collegiality.”
“We progressive members deeply regret this setback and warn of its consequences. We reaffirm our commitment to a plural, balanced, transparent Council faithful to its constitutional mandate of guaranteeing judicial independence and good public service of justice,” he concluded.
