"30% of my clients have attempted suicide or considered it"

BarcelonaCourt-appointed lawyers are receiving more attention, but precariousness means fewer and fewer professionals are willing to participate in this service. Across Catalonia, the exodus has been halved, coinciding with an agreement to improve remuneration, but the figures have not improved in the Barcelona demarcation, where the Bar Association of Barcelona (Icab) warns that the loss of professionals is 20% in the last decade. Xavier Batlle and Núria Astorgas are two of the professionals who have not wanted to abandon this task. Despite having the same job, they are court-appointed lawyers in two completely different specialities: minors, whose activity in Barcelona has increased by 10% in the last semester, and second chance, a mechanism that allows good-faith debtors to cancel their debts and which has grown by 23% in the last six months.

Xavier Batlle

"You never think that the person you endorse will stop paying, but it happens"

Xavier Batlle is accustomed to encountering the disbelief of the people he advises, even when the procedure is over and they no longer have outstanding debts. He explains that people come to him when they have tried everything, and regrets that the second chance law is still little known. The most frequent profile is that of a family "who at a specific moment asks for a loan of 15,000 or 20,000 euros to face the payment of a car or a child's university, for example", intending to cope with it, but at some point cannot afford it.

"If they stop paying an installment, very strong calls begin, and they go to the bank and are told 'Don't worry, take another 5,000 euros, and you'll be more at ease and can face an installment of 100 euros more, it's not that much'", until the situation becomes unsustainable and they accumulate debts. "When they start to have their assets seized, they see that they have to do something about it. If you wake up counting that you have 600 euros in the bank and there are zero, you react", explains Batlle. All of this, with a serious impact on mental health: "30% of my clients have tried to commit suicide or have seriously considered it", he laments.

Another profile that Batlle often receives at his office is that of people who lost their homes between 2010 and 2015 due to mortgage foreclosures. "Initially, when they take your apartment away, they charge you the costs. The costs for an apartment of 300,000 euros can be around 50,000 euros. If you sell the property for 70% of its value, we are talking about 50,000 or 60,000 euros of remaining debt, plus the costs. You are left without a home and with a debt of 100,000 euros. A normal family cannot recover from something like that".

Batlle assures that this is "a very typical case", and considers that it should have led to the creation of the second chance law, which was finally applied in 2022 by order of a European directive. To benefit from this mechanism, those affected must prove that they are insolvent in good faith – that they have been economically overwhelmed without any criminal conduct behind it – and can be exonerated from all private debts, while public ones are limited. "There are still families dragging this out after ten or fifteen years of having lost their homes and being in debt," he assures. In fact, on the same day he speaks with ARA, he is preparing the procedure for a family in which a man, his sister, and her husband were affected. "Before, people endorsed with their eyes closed. You never think that the person you endorse will stop paying, but it happens," he warns.

Núria Astorgas

"The worst thing you can do if they stop your son is to say he has done nothing in front of them"

Núria Astorgas says that, as a lawyer for minors, it is often more complicated to deal with parents than with arrestees. In addition to advising detainees, she must inform the relatives or guardians representing the minors. However, she also clarifies that she must respect the detainee, who in this case is a minor, and keep the professional secrecy they request. Adolescents between 14 and 17 years old pass through the juvenile justice system, as the youngest are not criminally responsible. Although she sometimes encounters "absolute denial," she must question them to clarify the facts and prepare a defense.

She explains that when minors are arrested for the first time, parents are very nervous and usually do not know how the procedure works. "Many feel frustrated or think they have failed," she admits. She assures that concern prevails in most cases, but she has also encountered parents who completely denied that their child could have committed a crime. She recalls a case where she had to show a man security camera footage that had recorded his son pushing a boy onto the subway tracks, because he did not believe he had done anything. "The worst thing you can do if your child is arrested is to say they haven't done anything in front of them," she assures.

At the other extreme are the parents of adolescents who have been arrested more than once. Most of the cases she handles involve robbery with violence, especially of mobile phones, and also sexual assault, often accompanied by the crime of disclosure of secrets. "Many adolescents do not know that forwarding sexual photos is a crime," she assures.

Astorgas has been a registered lawyer since 1991, and out of these 35 years, the case she remembers most is that of an adolescent accused of murdering his neighbor, a woman about 90 years old who was killed in her home by being hit with a decorative figure. She recalls that both she and the victim's family demanded that another neighbor of the building, who was never prosecuted, be investigated, and after a few months the case was eventually dismissed and the minor was acquitted.