Just 48 hours before the final whistle, the opening ceremony of the judicial year which will take place this Thursday in the plenary hall of the Supreme Court (TS) in the presence of Philip VIThe twenty members of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) reached a consensual agreement, by sixteen votes to four, to appoint Isabelle Perello Chairman of the governing body of judges and the TS.
Isabel Perelló will take office tomorrow, Wednesday, as president at an event that will take place in the same plenary hall of the Supreme Court.
Isabel Perelló, friend of Margarita Robles and member of the left-wing judicial association Judges and Judges for Democracy, although without clear links with Pedro Sanchez, Felix Bolanos either Candido Count Pumpidowas one of two options, with Ana Ferrerwho this Tuesday was still standing after the elimination of all the other candidates. Perelló and Ferrer met the two conditions required by the bloc of members chosen by the PSOE: to be progressive women.
Perelló, born in Catalonia in 1958, She will thus be the first female president in the history of the CGPJ and the Supreme Court.. Perelló has been a contentious and administrative magistrate of the Supreme Court since 2009, she has held positions at the Provincial Court of Barcelona and the High Court of Justice of Catalonia and, between 1993 and 2003, she was a lawyer at the Constitutional Court.
The new CGPJ has thus avoided one of the most feared eventualities in the judicial career. That the negotiation between the twenty members of the CGPJ, for the first time in forty years in which its president was going to be chosen autonomously and without the PP and the PSOE “pre-cooking” the appointment, would end up reproducing the old vices of politics and taking root in the blockade.
The election of Perelló also dispelled another of the doubts that weighed on this CGPJ. That the deputies ended up becoming simple representatives of the party that chose them and defending the candidate desired by the latter, without much room for maneuver.
The election of Perelló, a judge with a progressive profile, but proposed by the conservative bloc, shows that the current CGPJ is capable of reaching a consensus on its own. Something that opens a window of hope for the reform of the Organic Law of the Judiciary to which the PP and the PSOE committed themselves in the CGPJ unblocking agreement of June 25.
This agreement requires the CGPJ to approve within six months and by a three-fifths majority “a proposal for reform of the system of election of members of judicial origin, which will be transferred to the Government and the Cortes for debate and, if appropriate, processing and approval”.
Although this specific point of the agreement has been the subject of interesting interpretations, it is clear that its objective should be to adapt the law to what is stipulated by article 122.3 of the Constitution, which determines that twelve of the twenty members of the CGPJ are chosen by judges, and not by politicians.
For six years, this has been the real element that has blocked the renewal of the CGPJ and the battle that has been raging at the bottom of the disagreements between the PP and the PSOE. But the election of Perelló shows that if the governing body of judges wants it, it is capable of reaching an agreement for a reform of the law that increases the independence of the judiciary, in accordance with what is stipulated by the Constitution and what is desired by Brussels and the PP.
The new CGPJ should not let this opportunity pass. The independence of the judiciary, at a time when institutions are used as partisan weapons in political battle, is essential to the health of the democratic system.
