The United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee agrees with former judge Baltasar Garzón in concluding that the Supreme Court violated his right to the presumption of innocence and his right to review his conviction and sentence when he was sentenced in 2012 to 11 years of disqualification for the crime of prevarication, by ordering the intervention of the telephones of the lawyers of the main defendants in the Gürtel case.
In the opinion, to which Europa Press has had access, the Committee considers that Garzón did not have “access to an independent and impartial court in the proceedings against him in the framework of the Francoism cases (for which he was acquitted) and Gürtel , for which it has agreed that Spain compensate the former magistrate for the damage caused.
The former judge announced yesterday that he will request his reinstatement in the judicial career, although the Government must present its “explanations or written statements” and notify if it has adopted measures on the case of former judge Baltasar Garzón within a period of six months before the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations (UN), as established in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. However, the opinion is not binding on the Government.
The Committee has criticized the action of the Supreme Court and the fact that the ‘Franquismo’ and ‘Gürtel’ procedures were processed simultaneously, with trials held five days apart and with judges who participated in both cases, despite the request of the former magistrate of that they were challenged.
It has also concluded that the decisions of the former magistrate in the ‘Franquismo case’ (which investigated forced disappearances during the Civil War and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco) constituted a “plausible legal interpretation” in which “misconduct or incompetence that could justify their inability to perform their duties”.
Rules that he did not have access to an independent court or to a second instance
Regarding the Gürtel case, he asserts that Garzón’s interpretation, “even if it was wrong, did not constitute serious conduct or incompetence that could justify his criminal conviction, which led him to definitively lose his position.”
Thus, the Committee underlines that the Supreme Court’s conviction in the Gürtel case was “arbitrary and unpredictable, as it was not based on sufficiently explicit, clear, and precise provisions that precisely define the prohibited conduct” by law. In addition, he criticizes the fact that the former judge did not have access to a second instance to which he could appeal when he was tried by the highest Spanish judicial instance.
The UN ruling comes six months after the Committee announced its intention to study the case and five years after Garzón filed a complaint against Spain in which he alleged that he had been the victim of multiple violations of his human rights in the two procedures that were directed against him in the Supreme Court. Within the framework of his defense strategy, the former judge also appealed to the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights. Both denied his resources.
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