The Francisco de Vitoria Judicial Association – the second most representative of the judicial career, with 885 members – and the Independent Judicial Forum – with 338 – launched an appeal to the General Council of the Judiciary to fill 56 discretionary positions by “serious” shortcomings in the competition ruleswhich were approved by the CGPJ last October.
The appeal maintains that these bases are contrary to the requirements established by the Organic Law of the Judiciary because do not contain an objective weighting of meritsbut rather a “generic and broad” order of priority.
The appeal concerns the first positions of high judicial functions convened by the new CGPJ, which has more than a hundred pending appointments “inherited” from the previous Council, which was deprived of the power of appointment due to the extension of its mandate.
Concretely, the AJFV and FJI contest the convocation of four presidencies of the Chamber of the Supreme Court and of 16 positions of magistrates of the Third and Fourth Chambers of the Supreme Court; the presidency of the National Court and the presidencies of its three chambers; the presidencies of the High Courts of Andalusia, Castile and León, the Valencian Community, Catalonia and Castile-La Mancha, as well as the presidencies of several of their Chambers; and 10 presidencies of provincial courts.
Furthermore, the resumption of five selective processes interrupted in March 2021 – when the powers of the CGPJ were removed – and which the new Council does not consider to have expired, was the subject of an appeal.
According to the applicant associations, “the execution of certain appeals cannot be suspended for more than three years without affecting the rights of magistrates who, during this long period, may have consolidated the conditions for access to said positions”.
“Detailed” weighting
But the central core of the appeal is the “total nullity” of the 56 appeals launched against senior judicial officials for violation, among other precepts, of article 326 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary.
This rule provides that the call for competition “will clearly and separately establish each of the merits which will be taken into consideration” and “will indicate in detail the weighting of each of the merits”.
According to the applicants, this requirement “aims to force the Council to objectify the decision in accordance with international recommendations” from organizations such as the Group of States against Corruption, the Consultative Council of European Judges or the Venice Commission.
According to him, the bases approved by the current CGPJ “do not contain a detailed evaluation of each merit, but are limited to establishing generic priority criteria.”
According to this “order of priority”, the merits linked to government skills will be assessed based on the action program and the candidate’s appearance before the Qualification Commission; the merits linked to jurisdictional excellence, jurisdictional experience and, finally, the rest of the activities.
“This system, as one can deduce from its simple reading without much effort, is so open, generic and lax that it considers nothingserves only to know more or less what is important, but not to know how important each merit is,” the resource maintains.
“Everything depends on the nature of the place, its characteristics, the appearance or sufficiency of jurisdictional experience, in short on a subsequent subjective assessment given by the CGPJ itself, so that it does not respond to each person’s individualized weighting requirement. merit in the appeal established in article 326 with the aim that each candidate knows in advance the
the weight that each of the merits invoked will receive,” he asserts.
The task of thinking “is relegated to a completely subjective assessment and orphan of controlthe weighting criteria are not defined in detail in the call for each merit. In this way, the obligation to weigh can be materially avoided and the justification required by law will be purely formal. »
He also claims that the weighting linked to the appearance before the Qualification Commission – reduced to a maximum of 10 minutes – “is devoid of any practical content. This is a completely empty forecast. Candidates are required to attend an appearance which may be of no use“.
And criticizes the use of “dark concepts” as “the duration of service comparable to active service in the judicial career”, of which “we do not know what situations it includes”.
Gender
Recurrent associations consider that active service time “must include
in the event of pregnancy or leave for care, if you do not wish unfairly discriminate against women“.
In this regard, he criticizes the CGPJ for not respecting the II Equality Plan approved in January 2020, which provided for “regularly establishing an objective rating system of merits”, “a regulated regime free from gender bias, ideological or otherin which a specific and determined score is required for each of the merits to be evaluated.
The appeal highlights that, despite the fact that 73.7% of the candidates approved for the judicial exams in 2023 have been women and that 48.4% of the elective positions in government chambers are occupied by women, when it comes to of discretionary positions, only 22.58% of the members of the Supreme Court are women and only 11.8% of the presidencies of the TSJ are occupied by female judges.
