The Constitutional has encountered an unprecedented debate in its 45 years recently complied with history: courts that come to Europe to find a way of not fulfilling their resolutions. Open conflicts with the Seville Court in the case of the ERE of Andalusia, but also with the Superior Court of Madrid on a lawsuit between VTC companies, which lead to the Court of Guarantees to consider, for the first time in their career, what to do when a Spanish judge bridges him and takes his allegations to Luxembourg. All while the Popular Party Azuza delegitimation against the court that presides over Cándido Conde-Pumpido.
The sentences with which the progressive majority of the Constitutional annulled or clarified most of the sentences of the case of Andalusia did not sit well in ordinary justice. They did not like in the Supreme, where some consider that the Court of Guarantees has gone far beyond their powers to bend their arm in one of the most relevant cases of the last decade. Nor at the Provincial Court of Seville, which declared the criminal embezzlement of more than 600 million euros proven and has seen how its sentence on the cause has been reduced to the minimum expression.
This discharged disagreement, to date, had moved to public opinion by the usual method that judges and prosecutors use: anonymously and through the media. But it has been the audience of Seville that has taken another step when the time has come to apply the sentences of the Constitutional and has asked the parties if it should not, as the PP asks, to raise consultations to Luxembourg and that the Court of Justice of the European Union decides if, as the Andalusian Court, the sentences of the case of the Court of Guarantees are not “completely compatible with the right of the EU”.
The proposal of the Seville Court fell as a bomb in a Constitutional Court where the mood were already lit for weeks in account of the ERE of Andalusia. The magistrates of the progressive sector still looked sideways at the Supreme Court for their insinuations to be able to judge them for prevarication when, according to the sources of the Constitutional headquarters on Domenico Street Scarlatti, a decision of the Andalusian Court that they consider “unheard of” arrived. One form, some understand, to overcome their criteria and find a way to breach the sentences that deflate the case of the ERE.
The Hispanic judges have not been the only ones or the ones who have arrived in this attempt to bring to Europe the sentences of the Constitutional. The Superior Court of Justice of Madrid, with internal division, has raised a prejudicial issue to Luxembourg on an arbitration award between VTC companies – which generates internal discrepancies in the TSJM for years – that, in practice, explores the way for Europe to exonerate them to apply the constitutional sentence that took their reason. The particular vote of a discrepant magistrate defines what his companions do: “To overcome the pronouncement of the Constitutional promoting the issue before the Court of Justice of the Union.”
The preliminary ruling of the TSJM is already on its way to Luxembourg but the Constitutional has launched the machinery to, if necessary, intercept the consultation of the Seville audience on the case of the ERE. He has asked the Court for information on the steps that he is taking and the confrontation, unusual between courts, has become public and frontal: the Seville Court, before sending his providence, has asked the Constitutional that for what that document needs.
The movements of both territorial courts, which some constitutional sources consider as an “unheard of” attempt not to execute their resolutions, open a debate that few jurists dare to set aside in advance. From the ability of a court to raise preliments about sentences and not on laws until the route that opens so that, in practice, a judge can avoid the application of a constitutional judgment claiming that, according to its criteria, it can contradict community law.
The maneuver margin of the Court of Guarantees to stop these maneuvers is not clear. An internal report of the Constitutional affirms that the passage to the hearing of Seville and some sources can be cut off a recent resolution, of last October, of TJUE himself, which gave the reason to a Romanian territorial court but with an important nuance: in that country a judge that leaves “unusual ex officio” the resolutions of the Constitutional faces “disciplinary procedures”. That, says Luxembourg, goes against community law.
Campaign against the Constitutional
The judicial conflict opened by the Seville Court against the Constitutional arrives after campaign months of the Spanish policy right against the Court of Guarantees to delegitimize their sentences after establishing a progressive majority with Cándido Conde-Pumpido in front. Converted by the PP in “The Constitutional of Pumpido”, the debate opened by two territorial courts on the execution of their sentences has become political gasoline. Especially in Andalusia, where the judicial case of the ERE has accompanied the debacle of Andalusian socialism.
“Seville is today the symbol of judicial independence,” said Cuca Gamarra these days from the Andalusian capital, headquarters of the 27 PP interparliamentary this weekend, after the movement of the hearing at the request of his own party. “Conde-Pumpid said that the toga had to be stained with the dust of the road, and he himself has stained it too much,” Elías Bendodo apostilled.
The Movement of the Seville Court arrives a few days after the Constitutional dwarf the nth fire between them and the Supreme Court, presented by the right as an antagonist of a politicized court at the service of the Government. The Criminal Chamber had issued several cars in recent months inadmitting complaints of the extreme right against the Constitutional but opening the door that, in other cases, its magistrates could be judged to prevail in their decisions. The conflict had taken place in Domenico Scarlatti with a last car of the Supreme that excluded that possibility.
Most of the resources that arrive at the Constitutional Court remain at the door and do not pass the first admission filter to process. But the sentences of this court that amend the flat to the Supreme or other courts and territorial courts are not unusual. The latest data available are 2023 and reveal that of the 148 sentences issued in amparo processes throughout that year, almost half, a total of 69 resolutions, were estimatories in a total or partial manner.
From Alberto Rodríguez to Alberto Cortina
The case of the ERE of Andalusia is the first in which a court has decided to open the European way to try to ignore the Constitutional. The Supreme did not do it, for example, when the Constitutional reproached Manuel Marchena’s room to have left Alberto Rodríguez without a seat. Nor when, years before, the same Constitutional annulled the conviction imposed on singer César Strawberry for the exalting of terrorism. Or when, just over a year ago, Arnaldo Otegi was right and stopped the intention of the Supreme Court to take the bench again for the Batragune case after Europe was proved to the EH Bildu leader. Nor years before when, against the criteria of the Supreme, he legalized Sortu as a political party.
The annulled or reduced convictions of Manuel Chaves, José Antonio Griñán and other historical leaders of Andalusian socialism are also not the only open war that has existed between the cusp of the Spanish Judiciary and the Constitutional Court. The CGPJ newspaper library still keeps a statement, unpublished then and since then, from the Plenary of the Supreme Criminal Chamber accusing the Constitutional, in February 2008, of having stepped on his negotiated and having “emptied” his functions by revoking one of his sentences.
The Constitutional came from acquitting Alberto Cortina and Alberto Alcocer in the Urbanor case, one of the great economic judicial cases of the eighties. And he did it by reproaching the Supreme Court that would have condemned more than three years in jail without taking into account the prescription deadlines and that the case, in summary, had expired along the way.
The plenary response of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme, a few days later, was to issue a statement in which they accused the Constitutional of “emptying” the balance between supreme and constitutional: “Its essence is unknown, setting an interpretation of the ordinary legality that only corresponds to the Supreme Court,” said the criminal hall with similar accusations to those that are sought almost two decades later against the constitutional case of the constitution of the case.
None of the magistrates that were then in the Constitutional, who presided over the progressive María Emilia Casas, are still in the Court of Guarantees, but several magistrates of the Supreme Court continue to be part of the Criminal Chamber that the interference then denounced: the today president Andrés Martínez Arrieta, Julián Sánchez Melgar, Juan Ramón Berdugo and then a newly incorporated arrived from the prosecutor’s office. The conflict has plagued for a decade: still in 2016 a constitutional of overwhelming conservative majority accused the ordinary courts of incurring “repeated rebellion” not assuming its doctrine on the prescription of crimes.
The PP also did not resign against a constitutional of precarious progressive majority whose confrontations with the Supreme Court date back to the 80s, when the Criminal Chamber came to call to declare the magistrates of the Court of Guarantees for the filtration of the judgment of the Rumasa case. The aggrieve list is long and the criticisms of the PP are not new either. “The situation of the Constitutional is sorry,” said Manuel Pizarro, then candidate of the party of Mariano Rajoy, in full open war between courts in 2008.
Cándido Conde-Pumpido, then General Prosecutor, caused the rejection of the Constitutional to affirm that he disagreed “total and radical” with the sentence that acquitted ‘the shelters’. The actors are repeated in a similar conflict that, in this case, is on its way to Luxembourg.
Source: www.eldiario.es
