Spanish Supreme Court Allows Private Prosecution of Star Judge Baltasar Garzón for Misconduct in Public Office
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| 27-05-2009| Politics & LawSpain’s Supreme Court has decided this morning to allow a private prosecution for misconduct in public office to be brought against star Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón in a case related to his investigation into the disappearance of people during the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship.
Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón
The five Spanish Supreme Court judges have emitted a unanimous judgement (in Spanish, pdf) in favour of allowing a private prosecution, presented on 26 January 2009 by the right-wing trade union Manos Limpias to go ahead, in which it is alleged that Garzón used:
A ‘judicial device’… totally and absolutely dispensing with established procedure, the irretroactivity of criminial law, the 1977 Amnesty Act and his own actions and decisions, in which he rejected qualifying as genocide the murders at Paracuellos del Jarama…” and that he opened an investigation ‘conscious of its illegality and his own lack of competence to do so’.
The Supreme Court has held that:
“This court, without either evaluating or prejudging the events, understands that conditions to reject the bringing of this private prosecution do not exist given that what is asserted in the private prosecution is not something which, ab initio, can be considered removed from the criminal definition of misconduct in public office, at least insofar as it cannot be understood as either an absurd or irrational hypothesis.
The El Mundo refers to article 446 of the Spanish Criminal Code being applicable as the one dealing with judicial misconduct in public office and it offers three sentencing options were Garzón to be convicted.
The first two seem to deal with wrongful conviction and sentencing of prisoners so it would appear that the third point might be most applicable in this case:
A fine of twelve to twenty-four months and special disqualification from public employment for a period of between ten and twenty years, when (a judge) emits any other unjust sentence or decision.
A note on the political aspects of the case
Garzón is seen as a left-wing, socialist-supporting judge and Manos Limpias as a right-wing, conservative organisation.
Left-leaning El País has once again desribed Manos Limpias as an “ultra right-wing organisation” in its article on the judgement this morning, despite Manos Limpias having threatened to sue others for slander in the past for using the same adjective (including against current Spanish Director of Public Prosections Cándido Conde Pumpido, who later withdrew his statement, saying that he didn’t intend to slander but rather to “situate an initiative of the group within an exact political context whilst referring to a particular court case” whilst making reference to an El Mundo article linking the group’s chairman to former Spanish National Front leader (and former civil law notary) Blas Piñar.
Let’s see what happens next.
