Representatives of the progressive and conservative blocs of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) will hold a final meeting before the plenary session scheduled for this Monday at 5 p.m. to try to agree on the name of the president of the body after an intense weekend of talks that ended without an agreement.
With this afternoon’s plenary session, there will be five, intended to designate the highest representative of the ruling body of judges, who will also assume the presidency of the Supreme Court.
At the meeting that will take place five hours before, at noon, according to sources from the Council of Judges to ABC, the eight members who have made up the negotiating commission since the differences emerged during the first plenary session on July 30, one month and five days after being appointed and taking office, will be present.
Ángel Arozamena, Ricardo Bodas, José María Fernández Seijo and Esther Erice will represent the progressive bloc, while Alejandro Abascal, José Antonio Montero, José María Páez and Isabel Revuelta will represent the conservative bloc.
In an attempt to have a name that convinces both parties and represents both the CGPJ itself and the judicial and High Court career, the persons mentioned will start from the initial list of seven names that were put on the table at the first meeting after their appointment and whose candidates were subsequently eliminated.
This list is made up of Esperanza Córdoba, Antonio del Moral, Ángeles Huet, Carmen Lamela, Pablo Lucas, Pilar Teso and Ana Ferrer.
a woman
Precisely, the group of members appointed by the PSOE insisted in the meetings of the negotiation commission held between July and August (the last ones, by videoconference, this Saturday and Sunday) that the president should be Pilar Teso or Ana Ferrer, with the argument that a woman should occupy the presidency of the direction of the judiciary, to which the conservatives have repeatedly criticized that it was not that they wanted a woman at the head of the body but rather that they imposed one of these two names, two magistrates with known progressive tendencies.
In the last meetings, Ferrer’s name gained ground to the detriment of Teso as the final proposal of the progressive bloc.
The conservative bloc, which put the name of the progressive Pablo Lucas on the table as the one who could bring together the consensus of the twenty representatives once the four names (two men and two women) proposed are discarded, affirms that it will not accept the imposition of Ferrer or Teso. Faced with this impasse in the attempt at negotiation, the meeting preceding the plenary session is presented as a return to square one, with the list of the seven judges of the Supreme Court on the table. Before, around 10:00, the four representatives of each bloc also met independently to speak before the joint meeting.
Other appointments
Appointments that depend on the proposal of the president-elect, such as that of the vice president of the Supreme Court, the secretary general, the deputy secretary general or the promoter of disciplinary measures, have also taken center stage in recent meetings, since the conservative bloc would only be willing to give up the presidency if it is certain that the chosen profile “will know how to choose” the most suitable people for these “very important” positions. And they are not the only ones. They are also worried about who will end up leading the organization’s Observatory against Domestic and Gender Violence.
The members appointed by the PSOE (10) and the Popular Party (10) arrive without incident – despite numerous discussions by their representatives in recent weeks – at the meeting immediately preceding a plenary session very close to the start of the judicial course.
On Thursday, the traditional opening will take place at the Supreme Court, presided over by the King, and the lack of agreement appears once again, unless there is good news in the coming hours, in the protagonist of a CGPJ recently renewed after five years of disagreements. and the loosening between the members of the two tendencies and the lack of agreement between the PSOE and the PP, who managed to bring the organ to its list of achievements without renewal. The judicial career now requires that the newly appointed members choose independently and responsibly.
