The progressive vocal Pilar Sepúlveda has joined forces with the conservative sector of the Permanent Commission of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) to promote the appointment of María Jesús Millán as acting director of the Judicial School, the body based in Barcelona that coordinates the training of new judges. Millán was the preferred candidate of the majority of the CGPJ members proposed by the PP and it marks the first time that the school will be directed remotely from Madrid. The deputy chairman, Vicente Guilarte, also proposed by the PP, and the progressive vocals Roser Bach and Mar Cabrejas voted for the other candidate for the position, Clara Carulla, and announced a dissenting vote.
The choice of the new acting director of the Judicial School, a key body of the Judiciary because it is where all new judges who pass the competition are trained for a year (plus another year of practices), has become a new source of internal confrontation in the CGPJ, whose mandate expired five years ago. The center was inaugurated in 1997 and its main headquarters were located in Barcelona, but there have always been some legal sectors that wanted it to be in Madrid. This move would require a legal reform and is not within the power of the CGPJ members, but the conservative members have now seen an opportunity to remotely direct the school from the capital, taking advantage of the resignation, a few weeks ago, of the previous head of the center, Jorge Jiménez Martín.
The CGPJ’s current interim situation prevents it from officially appointing a director of the Judicial School because a 2021 legal reform withdrew its powers to make discretionary appointments, such as the head of the center where judges are trained. However, the members could choose a substitute for the resigned acting director, and this is where the conservatives have chosen to place a lawyer with a position in Madrid. During the personal interviews that the two candidates underwent last Tuesday, Millán, according to sources from the organization, admitted that she did not aspire to the position, but that she would have to accept it if the CGPJ understood that she should be automatically designated as acting director. A judge since 1988, the new acting director of the school joined the CGPJ in July 2018 as a lawyer in the Continuous Training Service, a position where she assumed the direction of numerous training activities. However, most progressive vocals believed that the position should go to the other candidate, Clara Carulla, a magistrate and head of the Initial Training Service, who serves as second in command at the school and has her position in Barcelona.
The positions have come to a head in the Permanent Commission, where three conservative members had formally protested against the fourth vocal of this sector, and deputy chairman of the body, for postponing the appointment of the acting director of the school last week. These three conservative councilors (Carmen Llombart, María Ángeles Carmona, and José Antonio Ballesteros) supported the election of Millán de las Heras, while Guilarte had aligned with the progressives Bach and Cabrejas in favor of Carulla’s candidacy. The Permanent Commission is made up of seven members, so the decision was in the hands of the third progressive vocal, Pilar Sepúlveda, who usually votes with the rest of her group but had been reluctant to support Carulla. Sources within the organization explain this stance as being based on personal reasons, related to the strained relationships between the former acting director of the Judicial School, the resigned Jiménez Martín, for whom Carulla was a right-hand woman, and the former deputy chairman of the CGPJ, Rafael Mozo, a personal friend of Sepúlveda.
The progressives and Guilarte were counting on Sepúlveda opting to vote blank on Thursday, which would have resulted in a tie between the two candidates that would have been resolved in favor of Carulla thanks to the casting vote of the deputy chairman. However, Sepúlveda prevented this option by voting against it.
