The opposition list 1994 won by three votes in the elections of the Association of Magistrates and the Competition judge, Leonardo Méndez, will be the new president of the organization, as confirmed The Observer with guild supplies.
The elections were held between Saturday and Sunday morning. There were about 500 magistrates authorized to participate.
The 1994 list will have five positions on the board of directors, while list 1 will have four. Terms last two years. The correlation of forces up to now was the reverse: list 1 had six places and list 1994, three.
Méndez was the insolvency judge who decreed the dismissal of Casa de Galicia. His group emerged in the previous elections and its main motto is “the defense of the workers”, as he told The Observer.
The 1994 list rejected how the ruling party treated the covid-19 tax (when it was decided to charge public officials a tribute for the health emergency) and raised objections about the way in which the Court uses disciplinary power. “The corporation does it in the legitimate exercise of its functions, but the same actions are not always measured with the same yardstick. We felt that the association looked the other way from the basic and essential concerns that we judges have,” Méndez said.
“We propose a more union vision, which seeks the protection of the rights of judges from their angle as public workers. Beyond the fact that we provide an essential service for the rule of law, we are public workers (…) We historically asked ourselves 50 times if we could claim something. Why not if we are workers? “He expressed in a note published by The Observer before the elections.
One of the members of the list is Judge Alejandro Recarey, who was in the controversy over the suspension of vaccination against covid-19 for children and adolescents. The group expressed its “concern” about the criticism Recarey received and stated that it threatened his technical independence.
“You have to face whoever has to face it: before the Court, the political system. Here there were pressures from different operators to what is the free exercise of the jurisdictional function and that in a State of Law is something to which you have to pay attention (…) Criticizing the sentence is fine, the problem is when the sentence is passed on to the person who dictates it. If you do that, you are trying to affect the technical independence of the magistrate. Luckily, the judges are strong and independent people, but it is not the same to work quietly”, he valued.
