The First Section of the Provincial Court has dismissed an appeal by the controversial Association of Jurists Jiménez de Asúa (AJJA), rejecting its exercise of popular prosecution in the Montecarlo case. The Investigating Court number 4 of Arrecife already ruled in 2016 against the claim of this association to appear in one of the parts of this case, specifically the one that focuses on the City Council of San Bartolomé, fearing that it is guided by "spurious, fraudulent or merely dilatory motives" and now the Court has ratified this decision, making it final.
In an order dated July 5, the court points out that it is enough to read the statutes of Jiménez de Asúa "to notice the absence of a legitimate and concrete interest in this case". "Generic objectives related to the defense of the Public Administration, the loyal and honest management of it, as well as its assets, are defined, which is nothing more than a programmatic declaration," the Court points out, adding that "the same" occurs "in relation to the defense of public interests in administrative action against arbitrary and fraudulent actions by public officials."
"And it also stands as a kind of guarantor of the cleanliness of judicial processes and compliance with procedural guarantees where there may be irregular judicial actions or that do not respect constitutional guarantees," the order continues, in which the Court states that "the configuration of popular action as a guarantor of the conduct of the Public Prosecutor's Office and the Administration of Justice itself is not acceptable in a democratic State of law, which implies a hypertrophy of the guarantee system." "Popular action cannot become a control mechanism over the judiciary," he points out.
And "even more so when it comes to formalizing such a claim under the protection of legal entities such as associations that lack an object of action beyond the exclusive interest in appearing in open judicial cases, and that they also do so without a defined concrete interest, doing so when the criminal procedure in its instruction phase has already begun to avoid having to formalize bonds with which to respond to the results of the process, but then greatly conditioning its progress by urging the practice of diligences that necessarily have to lengthen the cause and what is more substantial, formalizing accusatory claims regardless of the criteria of the public prosecution," he adds.
An ideology that "may hide diverse interests" to what is proclaimed
Thus, the Provincial Court concludes that the Association of Jurists Jiménez de Asúa is "merely instrumental of a generic ideology that does not allow an objective framing within the framework of this criminal case that conforms the idea of a legitimate and concrete action, which by its own meaning should represent the defense of specific legal assets, as usually happens with environmental associations", with "an extensive trajectory in the defense of collective values and "with real and transversal operating structures".
The court thus rejects the appearance of Jimenez de Asúa in the case, pointing out "the risk of plaintiffs such as the present one who are limited to a generic ideology that may well hide diverse interests to the pure defense of what is proclaimed in such a sensitive area as the criminal procedure."
A "Trojan horse with bastard interests"
It must be remembered that the Association of Jurists Jiménez de Asúa has supposedly tried to exercise popular prosecution in several cases of corruption, although its main steps when it has managed to enter have been aimed at trying to hinder these procedures, as the Prosecutor's Office, the investigating judges and the Provincial Court have warned, which even imposed a fine of 1,000 euros on the association for "procedural bad faith", when trying to remove the investigating judge from the Unión case.
Jiménez de Asúa also unsuccessfully filed a complaint against the first investigating judge of Unión, César Romero Pamparacuatro, and the Prosecutor's Office referred to her as a "Trojan horse with bastard interests." The Justice also rejected an "incomprehensible" and "inadmissible" lawsuit by Jiménez de Asúa in which he requested the dissolution of Urban Transparency, considering that he had no "legitimacy" for such a request.
AJJA has managed to appear in some cases, although the only Court where their theses have really been welcomed is the one led by Judge Rafael Lis, who was suspended for a very serious offense in the exercise of his position, for continuing to instruct a case in which there were doubts about his impartiality, due to his links with the businessman Juan Francisco Rosa, who had the magistrate's wife hired as a lawyer. In that Court of Lis, AJJA is present in several cases and even the judge attended to several of his requests until the day before having to leave to comply with the sanction of the General Council of the Judiciary.
