No citizen is above the law, the Spanish Constitution proclaims. Yet some institutions in Spain have granted themselves a kind of divinity: a separate treatment that shields them from criticism, investigation and punishment. When that aura reaches those who sit in judgment, Article 14 stops being a promise and becomes mere stage scenery.
The equality proclaimed by Article 14
Article 14 of the Constitution is unequivocal: Spaniards are equal before the law, and no discrimination may prevail on grounds of birth, race, sex, religion, opinion or any other personal or social condition or circumstance. And yet, layer by layer, institutional reality has built enclosures of practical immunity where the common rule does not enter, or enters only with kid gloves.
In August 2022, an investigation published by a national newspaper documented how, for years, church officials had been shielded from scrutiny over numerous offences, protected by the reverential treatment their status commanded. That case exposed a pattern that goes far beyond the Church: when an institution regards itself as untouchable, the law stops at its door.
Judges who judge themselves
That pattern reaches its most serious form in the justice system. Judges do not merely apply the law to others: they alone decide whether their own colleagues have broken it. The 1985 Organic Law of the Judiciary reserves their trial to the High Courts of Justice and the Supreme Court, made up of fellow career judges. It is an inbred system: the judge's judge is another judge, and the temptation of corporatism is ever present.
On top of that shield come the procedural privileges, known in Spain as aforamientos, enjoyed by thousands of public office-holders. In our view they also serve to dilute the anomaly: if many are privileged, the special treatment of those who dispense justice attracts less attention.
What we have documented
Our association has gathered cases which, according to the documents provided by those affected, describe alleged perversions of justice and obstruction that no judicial body has been willing to examine in depth. Among them:
- Criminal complaints seeking 500,000 and 50,000 euros, admitted and investigated, those affected claim, to intimidate citizens who had reported alleged irregularities in urban development entities or in property management.
- The admission of a complaint based on a document protected by data protection law which had allegedly been taken from a town hall, without the court ruling on its origin.
- Dismissals issued, according to the complainants, while ignoring decisive evidence: an allegedly forged contract, or a postal certificate proving that a meeting had not been properly convened.
- The refusal, in pre-trial proceedings, to give a co-owner access to the minutes of his own residents' association.
- The delivery of an allegedly defective recording of the hearing, which in practice frustrated an appeal, followed by the rejection of the ensuing complaint.
- The rejection of complaints of judicial misconduct on the grounds that "there is no right to a correct decision", without addressing most of the offences reported.
- A ruling of the National High Court which, on a formal technicality, penalised a person who had reported public aid to companies whose illegality, according to the complainants, had been established in a decision of the European institutions.
- The systematic rejection, before the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights, of the appeals through which these facts were taken to higher bodies.
The association keeps the documentation available to anyone wishing to examine it: please contact us.
The duty nobody fulfils
The Organic Law of the Constitutional Court offers a way out. Its Article 35.1 provides that, where a judge or court considers that a statutory provision applicable to the case, on whose validity the ruling depends, may be contrary to the Constitution, it shall refer the question to the Constitutional Court. When courts have been asked to do so with regard to the rules establishing these privileges, the answer has been inadmissibility. Those who benefit from the privilege are the very people who should be questioning it.
No robe turns a human being into anything more than a citizen: whoever judges others must accept being judged by the same yardstick.
Bringing the gods down from the altar
The solution is not to distrust the entire justice system, but to subject it to the same rules it demands of everyone else. We propose:
- Abolishing procedural privileges or reducing them to a minimum, starting with those of judges and prosecutors.
- Ensuring that complaints against judges are examined with reinforced guarantees of impartiality, through reasoned decisions that address every fact reported.
- Transparency in disciplinary and criminal proceedings against members of the judiciary.
- Effective protection, under Law 2/2023, for those who report corruption, including when the report concerns the justice system itself.
Institutional divinity survives only as long as citizens accept it in silence. Every documented complaint, every appeal and every voice that joins in removes a brick from that altar. Join those of us who believe that equality before the law admits no exceptions.