Why is the Spanish judge almost never sanctioned?

BarcelonaThe General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) has opened the way to open proceedings against judge Juan Carlos Peinado, arguing that the escorts of the president's wife, Begoña Gómez, could help her flee. Despite the media noise, history shows that sanctioning a magistrate is almost a chimera. Recent examples support this: in 2024, the CGPJ ended up archiving the proceedings against a judge who called the president of the Spanish government Pedro Sánchez a "psychopath", and in February 2026, the conservative majority turned a blind eye to magistrates Eloy Velasco and Manuel Ruiz de Lara, who called the president's wife "Barbigoña", invoking freedom of expression.

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Opening a case against a judge is an unusual practice in the Spanish state. According to Rebollo, for a complaint to overcome the disciplinary commission of the CGPJ is "something absolutely exceptional", as these "almost always end up being dismissed". Rebollo assures that "surely no complaint would be found in the last ten years that has prospered against a magistrate reporting facts like this or similar". The technical difficulty in pinning them down is immense. As Josep Lluís Martí, professor of philosophy of law at Pompeu Fabra University, points out in conversation with ARA, "if the ruling has given even a few arguments", the judge manages to "cover his bases formally with respect to any disciplinary proceeding", effectively shielding the content of his investigation.

This extreme complexity in demanding accountability paints a historical picture in which, according to Martí, "there has been excessive flexibility or tolerance towards the actions of judges". In Spain there are more than 5,000 active judges who, like any other professional group, "can commit abuses or do things that are irregular". Despite this, the Spanish disciplinary system suffers from a chronic structural deficit: "We have not had good practice in disciplining judges, neither through the CGPJ nor through the justice system itself", a lack of oversight that, according to the UPF expert, must be urgently reformed from the root.

This shielding is the ideal breeding ground for the expansion of lawfare, where the line between the judiciary and political offensives becomes blurred. Martí argues that "the aroma that emanates from this is that we have judges who lean towards lawfare", and states that Peinado's offensive against the Moncloa environment evidences "a political motivation of the judge himself that goes beyond what a state of law should allow". The expert, however, stresses the importance of technically separating the wheat from the chaff: while the investigations of the Audiencia Nacional in the Zapatero case or the Supreme Court in the Ábalos case are based on "more professional rulings, with arguments", the cases opened against Begoña Gómez or the Attorney General of the State respond purely to “a political instrumentalization of justice”.

The culmination of this architecture is an internal control system deeply marked by its own partisan nature. As Rebollo recalls, the disciplinary commission has members with a conservative profile who "inexorably vote, time and time again, against the complaints that are made." Martí's analysis concludes with a sentence that summarizes the distrust towards the institution: "No one expects, unfortunately, that the decision that is made there will be absolutely pure of law, based on law, and that it will not have political connotations."