It will undoubtedly be a historic ruling. This is a phrase with no previous equivalent. The truth is that there are also no precedents on many issues related to the trial against the State Attorney General. Hundreds of leaks are known to occur in our courts and prosecutors’ offices every year; However, never before had a judge or prosecutor been indicted for these events. On the other hand, the Supreme Court had never split to decide whether a trial should take place, but in this case a dissenting opinion was formulated, of enormous strength, in the sense that there was not the slightest indicative basis for Álvaro García Ortiz to sit in the dock.
Furthermore, this procedure has become a coveted workhorse in the context of the enormous political tension that exists in our country. And these situations test the solidity of any institutional system. The bodies of the Council of Europe have been warning for decades that in Spain there is dangerous partisan interference in the system of access to the high courts and in the configuration of the State Attorney General’s Office. His repeated recommendations on institutional reforms have so far gone unheeded.
Precisely the origin of the case against García Ortiz is linked to an issue of marked partisan nature, since it begins with a judicial investigation against the partner of the president of the Community of Madrid. It is therefore inevitable that many connect the apparent clash between high state institutions with this context of politicization of organizations that should be on the sidelines of these battles.
For reasons of institutional trust it would have been desirable, in the event of the Attorney General’s conviction, that the sentence was indisputable, predictable and very convincing. This possibility already seems complicated, given everything that has happened so far and because it has been reported that there will be two judges in court who are dissatisfied with the ruling and have announced that they will issue separate votes.
We will have to wait for the text of the judicial decision to analyze the legal basis of the sentence. There are many unknowns to be resolved by the court. If the journalists’ statements were not considered credible as exculpatory evidence, it is necessary to explain the reasons for this lack of conviction. If the conviction is based on the interpretation of indirect evidence, as seems likely, it will be necessary to clarify the complete causal link between the concurrent evidence and the conclusion that Álvaro García Ortiz was the person who disseminated these emails. In any case, this judicial assessment cannot raise doubts about paternity, because in that case acquittal would be mandatory, according to the well-known maxim in doubt pro reo.
Above the din of the attorney general’s detractors and defenders, the warnings of European organizations fly. An unprecedented case, of singular relevance for our country, must be resolved with a sentence that does not diminish the credibility of our institutional system.
