Introduction

First Stage: Constitutional Reforms

Second Stage: Increasing the Efficiency of Justice

Third stage: Overall Planning
a) The Administration of Justice Must be Perceived as a Public Service
b) Judicial Reforms Must be Implemented in an Integrated Plan
c) Judicial Reforms Must Be Based on Consensus

b) Judicial Reforms Must be Implemented in an Integrated Plan
A second conclusion gleaned from the Spanish experience is that in order to obtain effective results, any reform of the justice system must be based on an integrated plan which takes into account the administration of justice as a whole, as a system of persons, resources and procedures which must operate in a coordinated manner. Reforms implemented without an integrated plan, in a single jurisdiction or involving only a given aspect or procedure of the justice system without considering their impact on other sectors, often produce more disadvantages than improvements. All aspects of the complex administration of justice are interrelated, and it is difficult to reform a specific procedure, or the organization or selection process for personnel, without prompting profound changes in other sectors of the justice system. The Spanish experience has shown that reforms in court procedure require corresponding changes in the organization, selection and training of judicial personnel, as well as, in many cases, additional material resources. For example, the introduction of adversarial procedures in criminal proceedings requires the prior increase of the number of public prosecutors, as well as their re-training. The reform of civil procedure, increasing the role of oral proceedings vis-à-vis the traditional written proceedings, requires not only additional judges, but also additional installations in which to hold hearings as well as means for recording those proceedings. Likewise, to be really effective, changes in the administrative organization of the courts must be adapted to the requirements of the judicial proceedings. And any changes in procedures, personnel or administrative organization must be accompanied by adequate economic and material resources.

Certainly, we cannot exclude the possibility that reforms in a single aspect of the administration of justice may represent an improvement. In Spain, for example, the creation of integrated court services, grouping the administrative offices of several courts in one, has yielded very positive results. But given the complexity of judicial proceedings, any unforeseen deficiency in one aspect of the system, due to a lack of coordination with other areas, can paralyze or provoke long delays in their daily operations. At least in the case of Spain, possibly one of the reasons for the reduced effectiveness of some of the reforms introduced in the judicial system is due to a lack of coordination among them. Moreover, given that the operation of the courts affects fundamental rights guaranteed in the Constitution, any deficiency immediately elicits attention and criticism from public opinion and the press.

In Spain, the experience of the last few years has demonstrated the need to adopt this integrated perspective. There are many examples of reforms, which were less effective than intended due to not having calculated their repercussion in other areas of the judicial system. A few examples could be cited:

1. A well-intentioned reform introduced in 1995, which sought to relieve the backlog of pending cases in first instance criminal courts, by reducing their workload, subsequently threatened to paralyze the operations of the provincial criminal courts where this workload was transferred. In consequence, a second reform had to be hastily implemented, returning the jurisdiction in the matters in question to the original first instance courts.

2. To reinforce the effectiveness of the Judges Training School, a substantial increase in the initial training period for judges, extending it to two years, was approved in 1994 and implemented in 1997. As a result, there was a two-year period in which there was a notable scarcity of first instance judges, since no new judges were available during that time. The system had to be once again changed in 2000 to reduce the duration of the initial training period.

3. A new law in 1998 created a number of single-judge courts (juzgados) in administrative jurisdictions altering the traditional system, in which the judges sit in panels (salas). The goal of the reform was to expedite these proceedings and eliminate the huge backlog of pending cases. Despite the projected outlay of economic and material resources, the measure met with considerable difficulty since no provision had been made to train sufficient judges in this specialized field of law. When arrangements were made to provide the necessary training, an equivalent shortage of judges appeared in other areas, as the newly trained administrative judges were transferred from other jurisdictions.

4. The implementation of a new law on civil procedure, started early on the year 2001, has encountered difficulties since not enough provision was made for additional installations to accommodate new oral proceedings.

5. Likewise, there have been difficulties in applying the new juvenile criminal law, since there are insufficient prosecutors trained in that specialty.

The need to implement reforms from a global perspective of the judicial system became apparent in the mid-1990s. In 1997, after a year of work and analysis, the General Council of the Judiciary prepared a White Paper on the Justice System which, from the public service perspective, sought to offer an integrated analysis of the administration of justice in Spain, revealing its deficiencies and proposing overall solutions. Three years later and still insisting on this perspective, the Council approved a document entitled “Proposals for the Reform of the System of Justice,” based on the premise that reform must be coherently implemented in all areas of the system, including procedural reforms, changes in the methods of selecting and evaluating personnel and in administrative organization, and providing sufficient economic resources. This perspective was finally adopted by the Government and the principal political parties, as reflected in the “Pact for Justice” signed in May 2001, which takes a global view of the judicial reforms planned for the next eight years.