The first to have to respect justice are, obviously, the judges, of all levels, who must avoid with all the means at their disposal that their decisions are motivated by corporate interests. Trust in justice, writes magistrate Miguel Pasquau in his book The task of deciding (Debate, 2025), cannot rely on the infallibility of judges, some of whom are already known for their propensity to join their colleagues and engage with the political or ideological factors of each case. Trust is based on the reliability of the system. The strength of the system lies not in the judge, but in the decision-making process, that is, in the process. This is what must be protected and what was unfortunately strangely violated in the case against the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz.
The first anomaly is the fact that the conviction is made public without including the sentence, with the arguments that led to this conclusion. It is not the first time this has happened, but in most cases these are sentences that will be unanimous, approved by every single member of the court. It is assumed that in a case as important as the one involving a highest state authority, the judges had to undergo a long and in-depth deliberation, but the aftermath of what happened indicates exactly the opposite. Five Supreme Court justices thought one thing when they entered the room (they were supposed to sentence) and two thought the opposite. A week later, it seemed as if the necessary debate or exchange of ideas had never taken place.
The only alteration was produced by the testimonies of several journalists who assured that the State Attorney General was in no way their source for underlining that Alberto González Amador had recognized a fraud against the Treasury. Since journalists have a constitutional obligation to maintain the secrecy of their source, but not, in any case, the right to lie in court, the only option was to accept their statement or open proceedings against them for lying to the court. While awaiting the sentence, it seems that the five magistrates determined to condemn the Attorney General have avoided the possibility of confrontation with journalists and, at the request of Judge Marchena, have decided to return to the official note from the Prosecutor’s Office, which had initially been discarded as evidence and which, suddenly, returns to the fore as indisputable evidence.
The judges, the judicial system of a democratic country, agree that the best way to resolve a conflict “is to subject it to a process full of guarantees, at the end of which a third party (the Supreme Court) will decide, whose members only know, presumably a lot, the law. It is possible that some of these judges are convinced of the urgency of a change of government, but this change is possible in the Spanish democratic system only through parliamentary majorities. In any case, the judge, especially the Supreme Court, should never become is a piece of political strategy. And when this it happens, says Miguel Pasquau, that a prevarication is committed, “putting one’s own criteria before the legal ones, unduly appropriating the judicial function that has been entrusted to him”.
Delaying the sentence and the arguments will probably allow the García Ortiz case to be overtaken by many other news, conveniently distributed endlessly by algorithms created specifically by social networks. For this reason, it would be important for jurists and journalists who knew what happened well not to allow themselves to be distracted and to keep their attention focused. It is important, because in this case it is a political question of the first degree: has the Attorney General committed the crime of revealing confidential data? Or were two branches of the Supreme Court, opposite in the classification of the case, unable to argue according to their knowledge of the law and marked their sentencing decision from the first minute? Because if this were the case we would find ourselves faced with a serious case of possible abuse. We will have to wait for the sentence, some and others assure us, but the very fact that it was delayed and that the arguments were not known at the same time is what causes the most concern.
The sociologist Juan Linz, an expert on the failure of democracies, has long pointed out that we tend to overlook the actions of groups that were in principle interested in the survival of the democratic regime, but who ultimately withdraw their support, for simply corporate or ideological reasons, from institutions that could have been favorable or at least neutral. This is where democracies suffer the most damage.
