It seems that Pedro Sánchez, who has seen how His family environment is besieged by a judicial uproar Instigated by the far right, she finally fell off her high horse like a Saint Paul and realized that "there are judges playing politics" who are doing "terrible harm" to the judiciary. At some point, the Spanish left will have to acknowledge—and not in a television interview—that the Transition did not represent any "break" with the judiciary of the previous autocratic regime and that the "reforms" implemented in the 1980s were so weak that they have hindered it in terms of full liberal democracy.
Instead of spending the day repeating like a prayer that judicial decisions must be respected without hardly any criticism, it is necessary to begin to admit that Spain has moved quite far away from the canon that emerged with the Enlightenment and that conceived of law as something just, good and rational (Montesquieu said that "the judgment of the ... is the parameters of a liberal-democratic state in which the judge is subject to the rule of law, to the will of the legislator who represents the people, and is limited to correctly interpreting the law and applying it. That this is so has been perceptible in contexts such as the Catalan constitutional crisis, as demonstrated by the gross failure to apply the amnesty law, which has also highlighted the collusion of some lawyers with the deep state, with certain political bodies, intelligence services and biased media.
If we leave this aside, along with some other structural pathologies—such as the necessary democratization of access to the judiciary; the persistence of "extraordinary judicial bodies" like the National Court, heir to the Francoist Public Order Tribunal; or the partisan instrumentalization of the General Council of the Judiciary as the governing body of the judiciary—there is often no time or space to analyze another problem: the fact that the 1978 Constitution opted for a judiciary, anchored by atavistic inertias like the Provisional Law of the Judiciary of 1870, in the midst of the liberal unifying and codifying era, which created a single body of judges and magistrates, and the 1944 law that updated it, but above all, the Francoist Organic Law of the State of 1967, the foundation of the current one. It is often forgotten that the judicial leadership was a de facto power of the 1978 regime, as powerful as, or more powerful than, the armed forces.
It is therefore not surprising that the Constitutional Court stated verbatim in its ruling on the Statute that "one of the defining characteristics of the autonomous state, in contrast to the federal state, is that its functional and organic diversity in no way extends to jurisdiction." In other words, the autonomous state stems from a single Constitution, which also leads to a single jurisdiction, a paradoxical argument that could also have led to the decentralization of executive and legislative powers.
In short, the territorial structure of the State is, in principle, indifferent to the judiciary, and this is a problem because the territories can only residually assume some functions related to non-judicial personnel and material resources (payroll and photocopiers), without influencing fundamental issues such as the language of judicial proceedings or the appointment of court presidents. The 2006 Statute attempted to raise the bar and was struck down. And, although it is difficult to establish common normative categories, Spain is far from realities such as Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, or even the United Kingdom (Scotland and Northern Ireland) and Denmark (Greenland and the Faroe Islands) in terms of comparable factors such as the institutional autonomy of judicial bodies and the possibility of judicial demarcation regions.
