Former State Attorney General Consuelo Madrigal has sent a letter of rectification to the current Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, where he makes it clear that his ways of proceeding in the face of general elections at the head of the institution do not bear any similarity.
García Ortiz convened the Fiscal Council last Monday to appoint various discretionary positions of the fiscal leadership -among them the prosecutor of the Human Rights and Democratic Memory Chamber to which Dolores Delgado aspires- two hours after the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez , will announce the electoral advance. The majority of the Fiscal Council has asked him to suspend the meeting since there are no urgent reasons to make the appointments, but the attorney general has refused to do so, giving as examples different appointments during the mandate of Madrigal and the former attorney general of the State, Maria Jose Segarra.
In the document, sent today to the attorney general and to the members of the Fiscal Council, Consuelo Madrigal maintains that “during my tenure as attorney general, when the legislature was close to expiring but since time before the general elections were called on December 20, 2015, I decided to refrain from making proposals for discretionary appointments, promotions and promotions, for the sake of the democratic quality of my management and in order to avoid undesirable tensions within the institution”.
In the letter, to which EL MUNDO has had access, the prosecutor of Sala explains that it was a “personal decision prudently adopted with the deliberation, consent and support of the heads of the central bodies of the Attorney General's Office.”
Regarding the specific case that García Ortiz tried to compare with the appointments of the prosecutors of the Chamber of Democratic Memory and Hate Crimes – it was about the extension to 72 years of the prosecutor of the Chamber Olayo Eduardo González-, Madrigal states that it was a ” quasi-automatic procedure that did not compromise or affect the interests or expectations of any other member of the Prosecutor's Office and that did not require or allow a public offer or tender”. In other words, a situation that is not at all similar to the appointment of prosecutors in the highest category of the prosecutor's career that the current attorney general intends to carry out now: “I limited myself to the affiliation of the interested party to the body of the Public Prosecutor's Office in the that his specialization could be more useful than the one from which he had left five years ago when he was promoted to prosecutor of the Chamber”.
Madrigal now demands a rectification from García Ortiz given that the attempt to equalize both actions “seriously compromises my good name and the image of my career at the head of the Public Prosecutor's Office, involving us in a context of questioning and delegitimization, to which I am totally oblivious”.
In addition, the prosecutor of the process emphasizes that “the invocation of a decision of these characteristics as a precedent leads the public to a serious error. (…) For this reason, and in exercise of the right of rectification, I am writing on this same date to the chief prosecutor of the Head of the Technical Secretariat and request that the aforementioned point be rectified and clarified, as well as the dissemination of such clarification with the same scope and by the same means with which the information to be rectified has been published”.
The majority of the Fiscal Council, against
For its part, the majority Association of Prosecutors has described the performance of Álvaro García Ortiz as “surprising”, highlighting that “none” of the previous prosecutors general, “once Parliament has been dissolved, has made appointments to discretionary posts”, but instead those that were pending were “deferred”.
Along the same lines, the Professional and Independent Association of Prosecutors (APIF) has denounced that “it is not remembered that this has happened on another occasion, a Council with important appointments, convened with the utmost urgency, just when the Courts are dissolved and it is announced a new electoral process. From both associations they do not question that the Fiscal Council can meet to make the appointments -the attorney general ceases when the Government that appointed him becomes in office after the electoral call- but rather the reasons of opportunity and urgency to carry out such appointments, putting the focus on the square longed for years by former minister Delgado, the prosecutor for Human Rights and Democratic Memory.