The Supreme Court on Tuesday released the full sentence convicting the state’s former attorney general, Álvaro Garcia Ortizfor the offense of revealing secrets.
The resolution, 233 pages long and supported by five of the seven judges who judged the case, presents a solid, coherent and conclusive legal basis that dismantles the accusations of arbitrariness launched by the government and its allies.
The sentence also shows a higher burden of proof than that of many other convictions which have never been questioned so vehemently by those who now cry “right“.
The belief rests on two pillars.
First, the leak to the SER of the email of February 2, 2024, in which the lawyer of Alberto Gonzalez Amador He acknowledged that his client had committed “certainly two crimes against the public treasury” and requested a compliance agreement.
The Supreme Court considers it proven that this information was communicated to the journalist by the State Public Prosecutor’s Office “with direct intervention, or through a third party, but with the full knowledge and acceptance of Mr. García Ortiz.” Miguel Angel Campos.
The literalness with which the SER reproduced the content of the email, the temporal synchronization between the receipt of the document by the Attorney General and its media dissemination and the absence of any reasonable alternative constitute a evidentiary body that the court itself describes as “solid, coherent and conclusive”.
Second, the official information was released by the State Attorney General’s Office on March 14, written under the express instructions of García Ortiz, who even dictated some of its passages.
The Attorney General himself was proud of this authorship at the time, publicly defending its content as a legitimate exercise of institutional transparency.
However, the Supreme Court emphasizes that this note contained data which should not be disclosed due to its confidential nature and its direct impact on the presumption of innocence and on González Amador’s rights of defense. who had not yet been judged.
The sentence recalls that the Attorney General had “a reinforced duty of confidentiality which he violated without justification”.
The Supreme Court directly rejects the defense argument that the memo was sanitized and the data was already public.
With legal clarity that is difficult to refute, the judgment explains that the Public Prosecutor’s Office cannot rely on previous leaks (of unknown or illicit origin) to repeat and amplify, with the institutional seal of the General Prosecutor’s Office, the disclosure of protected data.
Why is this The institutional position of the Attorney General is not equivalent to that of a media. His word has a binding and legitimizing force, and transforms simple information into an “authoritative story” with devastating legal and reputational consequences.
The government’s reactions to this decision are as revealing as they are worrying.
The ministers Oscar Puente And Oscar Lopez publicly mocked this sentence, while the spokesperson for the PSOE, Montse Minguezalluded to a “new legal concept: filtration without filter”, forgetting that article 28 of the Penal Code punishes both the direct perpetrator of an offense and the intermediate perpetrator.
The president of the government, for his part, came to demand that it be Ayusoand not the Attorney General, who apologizes, in an obvious attempt to distort reality and turn the convicted criminal into a victim… of his own victim.
This ridicule of the Supreme Court’s judgment is not a legitimate exercise in political criticism, but rather a calculated strategy aimed at undermining its legitimacy and paving the way for possible rectification by the Constitutional Court.
Government sources have suggested they are confident that the TC, with its current progressive majority, agree with García Ortiz when he presents his call for protection.
The precedent of the ERE, where the Constitutional Court annulled the Supreme Court’s convictions against the former Andalusian socialist presidents by seven votes to four, or that of the amnesty law, weigh on this calculation.
The underlying question is inevitable. Can a court challenged because of its partisan composition acquit someone who was appointed attorney general by the same government that renewed that court?
The crisis of legitimacy of the Constitutional Court, aggravated by recent decisions which have reinforced the perception of politicization, would reach unprecedented dimensions.
The separation of powers, a fundamental principle of the rule of law, would also be definitively compromised if Pedro Sanchez succeeded in obtaining that the Constitutional Court annuls, once again, an unfavorable decision of the judiciary.
The systematic use of the notion of right by the government and its parliamentary partners also constitutes a direct attack on judicial independence.
To accuse the Supreme Court of waging a “judicial war” against the executive for convicting an attorney general who broke the law is to perversely invert the terms. He right It is not that judges judge those who commit crimes, but rather that political power uses justice to persecute political adversaries.
In short, the Supreme Court’s ruling is not an exercise in argumentative creativity, but rather an exercise in legal rigor. Its evidentiary basis is superior to that of many other convictions which have never been questioned with such intensity.
The fact that the government is trying to delegitimize him through mockery and disqualification reveals his true conception of the rule of law. Useful when it favors your interests, useless when it contradicts them.
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