Magistrates and bullfighters share few things, but they agree on one page of the dictionary: the word “jurisdiction”. For a judge, this implies the type of trial he will review and sentence. For a bullfighter, he designates his meeting point with the bull he is going to kill. This Thursday, the Madrid Bar Association (ICAM) brought together the two worlds for the second year in a row so that lawyers, politicians, magistrates of the Spanish judicial elite and members of the judiciary could stand up to defend bullfighting and against the government, criticize “woke culture”, regrets that the bullfighter ‘Manolete’ is not studied in schools and explains that their children “aren’t stupid” to go to bullfights since they were little .
This is the second time that ICAM has celebrated these days with its section specializing in bullfighting law after last year in Las Ventas. This year, one of last year’s speakers opened fire: José Antonio Montero. Then a litigation magistrate of the Supreme Court and today a key member of the General Council of the Judicial Power, he recalled that during the first edition of the congress, they already wanted to send “a message of freedom and tolerance” against “the awakened culture who established himself with unique and politically correct thinking.
“The party is recovering, the youth is coming back, perhaps in rebellion against the prevailing intolerance,” added this member of the governing body of judges, in his brief initial intervention, before triggering the first applause of the morning at the headquarters of the party. exclusive Serrano street in the capital. There were jurists among the speakers, but also among the guests: César Tolosa, from the Constitutional Court, who was already speaker last year, the president of the Superior Court of Extremadura María Félix Tena, the former minister María Dolores de Cospedal or Dimitry Berberoff, recently appointed vice-president of the Supreme Court, followed a good part of the interventions.
One of the most famous speakers was Enrique Arnaldo. A magistrate in the conservative sector of the Constitutional Court, he frequents the arenas and has written numerous academic articles on the subject. This Thursday he declared with a laugh that the most important position of his career is not the one he holds at the Guarantees Court but the one he held at the Bullfighting Affairs Center of the Community of Madrid, he recognized that he is one of the rare ones who still carries a scarf in his pocket and who has reviewed in detail the situation of bullfighting in the Colombia of Gustavo Petro.
He also took up the challenge posed by the vocal Montero and lamented the “air of despair” of those days. “They tend to be on the defensive, we defend ourselves against anti-bullfights” and “totalitarianism which wants to impose uniformity of good, condemning others to hell”. One day after debating in the plenary session of the Constitutional Court the legal personality of the Mar Menor, Arnaldo narrowly avoided the question of “the extension of the notion of person” and announced that he would continue to make “numerous other conferences to defend pluralism and tolerance.” “Defend what belongs to us,” he added, referring to bullfighting.
A member of the Supreme Court was charged with tackling some of the thorniest questions of the era: whether bullfighters are legally protected from an artistic standpoint and whether or not it is appropriate to take young children to the bullfights. Antonio García, one of the last members of the Civil Chamber, explained that closing the bullrings to the youngest would generate a “paradox”, because it would restrict the “right” of a minor to be a “bullfighter”. He also explained that his own children went to bullfights when they were little. “I can assure you they’re not idiots, none of them,” he joked.
Many speakers and participants from the legal world are part of courts that in recent years have issued key decisions for the bullfighting sector, although none of them signed the resolutions. These decisions were commented on Thursday and celebrated or politely booed depending on whether or not they benefited the bullfighting world.
The Chamber to which Antonio García belongs, for example, declared that the tasks of bullfighters cannot be protected by intellectual property mechanisms, which the magistrate regretted during his presentation, denouncing a “legal vacuum” and comparing a bullfighting at a rap cockfight. . “It would be desirable to consider the need to broaden the definition of a work,” he said. The Chamber to which Tolosa and Montero belonged until recently is the one that has largely protected bullfighting by prohibiting popular consultations like those of Donostia or Ciempozuelos (Madrid), in addition to having forced the government to include bulls in the Youth Cultural Bonus.
Also very celebrated for five hours, the two constitutional judgments which annulled the laws of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands which, at the time, limited or even prohibited bullfighting, as well as the resolution which confirmed the conviction of a councilor of Catarroja for insulting the deceased. the bullfighter Víctor Barrio. Some speakers even recalled that there were judgments from these courts to come and made the list of the Three Wise Men. “I hope that the Supreme Court will examine the appeal of the Toro de Lidia Foundation against the abolition of the national award,” said a Cordoba lawyer linked to this foundation.
“A sad bull? His mother must have died!
Magistrates from the Supreme and Constitutional Courts and members of the Judicial Council participated in the sessions or were witnesses accompanied by very important lawyers in the world of legal defense of bullfighting, some of them linked to the Foundation Toro de Lidia, author of numerous legal resources on the subject. For example, the one presented before the third chamber of the Supreme Court against the suppression of the national sentence.
Two of the lawyers who intervened were Francisco Gordón and Fernando Navarro. Featured as lawyers in the program, they are also linked to the Toro de Lidia Foundation from Cordoba and Granada respectively. Gordón was the first to take the floor to review the successes of bullfighting before the Constitutional Court, citing in turn the dissenting opinions of magistrates such as Fernando Valdés, Juan Antonio Xiol, Adela Asúa, María Luisa Balaguer or the current president, Cándido Conde-Pumpido. , claiming to have made “downright uncertain” comments and even accusing some of them of “distorting” reality.
Several speakers delighted the audience at the Madrid Bar Association by openly mocking the theories that develop the feelings of cattle. “World Animal Protection. This entity says that a cow’s eyes reveal how she feels, that she likes to receive affection, that just like you, cows have best friends and personalities,” Gordon said. “Does the bull show sadness? “His mother must have died!”, lawyer Joaquín Moeckel then joked. A few seconds earlier, lawyer Fernando Navarro had also regretted that the great figures of Spanish bullfighting do not appear in school textbooks. “Have you read a manual explaining who Manolete was?” he asked. About the poet Federico García Lorca, he also said that “the part of Lorca that is interesting comes, but not the bullfighting part of Lorca.”
If bullfighters and judges agree on the term “jurisprudence”, lawyers and politicians shook hands this Thursday at ICAM by attacking Ernest Urtasun, Minister of Culture, for having abolished the National Bullfighting Prize. Miguel Ángel García, advisor to the Presidency of the Community of Madrid, closed the event by highlighting the figures of Las Ventas “as much as it can be against the current Minister of Culture”, and declaring that animalism ” is nothing more than another pretext “to erase Spanishness. “We will always be there to put this course on bullfighting,” he declared, before the final applause.
A few hours before, the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, had highlighted the same idea during the opening of the event. “Popular fervor for bullfighting is regaining momentum, but there is a political debate, also on the part of the ministry, with the ban on bullfighting. It’s as if the Ministry of Industry is against industry,” the mayor said with the speed of an opponent.
The general conclusion of the conference is that the judgments of the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court of recent years protect bullfighting by considering it as a cultural event which deserves to be protected, even if they regret that this protection comes from jurisprudence and not a “great law of bulls”, as José Luque, magistrate and president of the Real Maestranza de Caballería of Seville, explains. “If this level of jurisprudence did not exist, the bulls would be an abuse,” he concluded.
