The State Attorney General, Alvaro Garcia Ortizdemanded “transparency” and the fight against “disinformation, lies and falsehoods” as necessary tasks of the institution he presides over. This is how his speech to the Supreme Court and the King began. Philip VIdelivered at the start of the opening ceremony of the judicial year, held this Thursday at noon.
What is relevant in these words of García Ortiz is that he has already pronounced them, before the High Court, a few days before the same judicial authority ruled on his accusation for ordering the distribution of a press release denying an article published in the press about the prosecutor who accuses Alberto Gonzalez Amadorboyfriend of the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Diaz Ayuso.
This informative note, whose disclosure García Ortiz was responsible for, indicated that, despite what had been published in a newspaper, it was not the Public Ministry that had proposed to González Amador to reach an agreement, but rather his lawyer who had approached the Prosecutor’s Office to offer it and to recognize the commission of two tax crimes by your client. The official statement included details, such as excerpts from conversations with e-mail between the two and the exact dates and times thereof.
And in the coming days, it will be this same Supreme Court —before which the State Attorney General pronounced this defense of transparency— who decides whether to charge him for the dissemination of this note, for a possible crime of revealing secrets.
García Ortiz, in his speech, stressed that Spanish society “has the right to ask, demand and question what we do and how we do it.”
“For citizens as a whole to be able to exercise these rights, they must have true information from reliable sources“, he stressed, before making public the latest edition of the Report of the State Attorney General’s Office, which includes a summary of the activity of the Public Ministry during the year 2023.
“The Prosecutor’s Report is one of those sources that transcend the moment in which it is presented. It projects itself into time thanks to the rigor of its data in the face of the banality of other comments doomed to die in certain press titlespromotes trust in institutions and combating disinformation, lies and falsehoods“one of the most important risks for our democracy and also for our coexistence,” he stressed.
Popular accusations
Similarly, the Attorney General called for “reflection” on the role of the popular accusations in legal proceedings, in order to combat “spurious ends”.
Popular accusations are those of persons or organizations that appear in a criminal investigation although they are not harmed by the facts studied, but are intended as a guarantee of the progress of the procedure and so that the Prosecutor’s Office is not the only accuser.
This is why García Ortiz considered it “necessary to reflect on the exercise of popular action.”
“The use in criminal justice of a figure which, despite its constitutional provision, allows direct access to judicial investigation bodies without any filterincreases the risk of prospective investigations and perverts the natural and logical pattern according to which only investigations in which there are strong indications of criminal responsibility should be brought before the courts (…), he stressed.
For example, the prosecution insists that the appeal be filed Begoña casein which Begoña Gómez, the wife of the president of the government, Pedro Sánchez, is being investigated. Several popular accusations are being made in this case. —the political parties Vox and Iustitia Europa, the Catholic association Hazte Oír, the union Manos Cleans or the lawyer and youtuber Aitor Guisasola—who requested dozens of instructions from the investigating judge.
“A system which, on the other hand, allows direct access to fifty million citizens before the Supreme Court This is not a sustainable system neither effective nor comparable in the European environment. It risk of collapse “The court itself and the rest of the courts is evident,” the attorney general said.
“It is a positive figure, in principle,” admitted the attorney general about the popular accusation. “But it happens that any foreign interest – as we have said – has access to it at the very end of the process. An interest that does not necessarily have to be illegitimate, but which, if misused, can become so. A special interest, an inalienable right in the case of victims of criminal acts, but undoubtedly worrying in other cases,” he warned.
“When private, political, religious, corporate, economic, media or even simply procedural objectives are sought. All of them move away, as they say, from the objectives of the criminal investigation,” he said.
“The best way to divert resources, human and material, from the objectives for which they were designed is flood it with paper. Not only does this impact the quality of Justice, its priorities, but it also helps to promote recourse to the process and to the courts with fallacious endings” he warned.
In his speech, the head of the Prosecutor’s Office also referred to another current problem: foreign minors who arrive in Spain without an adult to protect them. These are the so-called menasacronym for unaccompanied foreign minors.
“It will be history that judges us if, when we talk about migrant boys or girls, we refer to them as if they were simple goods, numbers or stickers which are exchanged on the word market or, more dangerously, sow hatred against these particularly vulnerable people who can catch fire. misinformed or manipulated companies” said the attorney general.
