After several months of absolute silence, the Ministry of Justice speaks out and finally agrees to reinforce the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court when it finds itself in a limit situation both due to the number of casualties in the workforce and the barrage of resources that it has begun to receive for patrimonial responsibility of the State during the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to government sources, this Thursday the General Secretary for Innovation and Quality of the Public Service of Justice, Manuel Olmedo, and the President of the Third Chamber, Judge César Tolosa, met.
At the meeting, Olmedo showed the firm willingness of the Ministry of Justice “to undertake as many procedural reforms as are necessary to improve the functioning of all jurisdictional bodies and, very uniquely, of the Supreme Court (TS), given the relevant role it provides” .
The general secretary has transferred to Tolosa the will of the Ministry that the proposed reforms be incorporated, via amendment, into the Procedural Efficiency bill, as reported by EL MUNDO.
Likewise, Olmedo has stated that Justice understands the difficulties that the processing and resolution of that enormous bag of patrimonial responsibility matters due to the pandemic that the president has referred to him will generate for the Third Chamber, being favorable to the reinforcement measures proposed by the Chamber. Third, consisting of the provision of three coordinating lawyers, with the category of magistrate, who will take charge of the management and technical assistance tasks of the corresponding prosecution section.
In addition, the general secretary has also informed Tolosa that the Ministry “is working on a legislative reform that ends the situation of pay difference that, since the 2015 reform, the coordinating lawyers of the TS suffer depending on the body of origin” .
For its part, from the High Court it values very positively the commitment adopted by Justice to assume the requests that the Government Chamber has been raising since last January to avoid the collapse of the Third Chamber.
Legal sources report that “the court values the Ministry’s commitment to provide the Third Chamber with a new Secretariat, with a lawyer from the Administration of Justice and the appropriate official staff, to deal with the entry of litigation of patrimonial responsibility of the State derived from measures taken to deal with Covid”.
On the other hand, the Permanent Commission of the General Council of the Judiciary has debated this Thursday on the refusal of Justice to extend fifteen reinforcement judges in different courts of Spain.
In the governing body of the judges, they consider the decision adopted by the Ministry due to “lack of budget allocation” to be very worrying. According to legal sources, the members have agreed today to urgently request a meeting with the Ministry “at the highest level” to ask the Government for explanations about its refusal to extend the aforementioned service commissions.
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