With the start this Monday of his trial before the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court, Alvaro Garcia Ortiz has recorded a disgraceful first: becoming the first attorney general in Democracy to be tried for an alleged crime.
In his case, one of revealing secrets, punishable by a prison sentence of up to four years, a fine and likely to cost him his job.
If this unprecedented situation has been able to occur, it is because García Ortiz has persisted in reaching the oral hearing in possession of his position as attorney general.ignoring requests for resignation from broad sectors of the prosecutor’s career.
And not only has he appeared in the first session of the trial as head of the State Attorney General’s Office: he has made use of all the formal prerogatives that this condition grants him.
He has worn the toga and the heck of the attorney general’s attire.
By virtue of his status as a jurist, he has sat on the bench alongside the State’s attorney, rather than in the dock.
He has entered the building through the main door of the Supreme Court, reserved for the authorities.
And he was applauded by his subordinates upon leaving his appearance.
Of course, all this dramaturgy is not causal. It is the way of staging an institutional clash from the State Attorney General’s Office and to launch a challenge to the Supreme Court.
But, with this, García Ortiz only confirms the impression that the majority of citizens harbor when representing him as an instrument at the service of the Government of Pedro Sánchez.
Because it is the president who, having ratified his support for the prosecutor to the end, is challenging the Supreme Court through an intermediary, thus feeding his narrative about the politicization of a part of the judiciary in conspiracy against the Government.
Both Ferraz and Moncloa have launched a smear campaign in recent months over the magistrate’s “shameful” instruction Angel Hurtadoin order to delegitimize the judicial process and portray García Ortiz as a victim of persecution with spurious motivations and “without any evidence.”
In the reverse Spain of Pedro Sánchez, the highest representative of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, in charge of ensuring legality and the rights of citizens, He is an alleged criminal accused of leaking confidential information about a taxpayer.
But the institutional anomaly is twofold. Because it is the Government that, subverting the scheme of the balance of powers, seeks to prosecute the conduct of the judges.
García Ortiz has flatly denied having been the one who leaked to the press the incriminating email from Ayuso’s boyfriend’s lawyer. But regardless of whether he is acquitted or convicted (in which case the Government would turn him into a martyr of the lawfare), The damage to the institution will now be irreparable.
Because the credit of the State Attorney General’s Office is based on its independence. And it is precisely the image of impartiality that García Ortiz has irreparably damaged, by persisting in the exercise of his magistracy despite being immersed in a judicial process.
It is evident that the prosecutor has subordinated the good name of the institution he still directs to the obstinacy to clean up his own.
But it has become evident once again that The Government has cared more about challenging Justice and winning the story of the judicial persecution than about the reputation of the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The institutional aberration to which subordinating the entire state machinery to personal and partisan interest leads has reached its apotheosis with this case.