Adrián Vázquez, MEP: "The Commission’s report puts Spain’s rule of law on par with Hungary’s"

Following the publication this week of the European Commission’s Rule of Law Report (2026) as well as two rulings by the European Union’s Court of Justice on the amnesty law, it might seem that justice is back at the center of the political agenda. But the truth is that the relationship between justice and politics has been under constant debate in recent years, and its current centrality is not good news.

Adrián Vázquez Lázara, MEP and vice-president of the European Parliament’s Committee on Constitutional Affairs, is well aware of the European dimension of these controversies. For years he has followed the debates in Brussels on judicial independence, the rule of law, and the fit of the Spanish system into the EU framework.

In this conversation with Agenda Pública, Vázquez maintained that the Government "has done absolutely none of what was asked of it last year" in areas such as the fight against corruption, judicial independence, and respect for judges. He also critiques the European resolutions on amnesty, defends the separation of powers, and calls for the "total disconnection of the Attorney General’s Office from the Executive," which he sees as a reform of highest urgency. After lamenting the "colonization of institutions" and attacks on judges, he warns that the "filters" inherent in the separation of powers are being eliminated. He concludes by asserting that "this is how any authoritarian State begins."
 
What’s your assessment of the EU Rule of Law Report from this year?

The first thing to understand is that the report is an annual review of the rule of law, which is a very broad concept.

Unfortunately, all citizens in Spain now know what that means – or at least they have a fair idea. Ten years ago, no one was interested in the topic. That shows that there’s a problem, obviously.

The Commission’s report should be compared with previous annual reports and also put in the context of other countries. You can’t understand if you don't compare.

What we’ve seen in the last five years, and especially the last two, are reports that – albeit in the language of Brussels – are devastating. Not only do they ask for reforms around judicial independence, or in the case of Spain on the situation of the State Attorney General and the General Council of the Judiciary, but they use language that you have to know how to interpret. As regards reforms of the CGPJ or problems of corruption, for example, they use very broad terms by Brussels standards.

"What we’ve seen in the last five years, and especially the last two, are reports that – albeit in the language of Brussels – are devastating"

It must be understood that Brussels isn’t Europe’s policeman, but it does have to warn impartially about what’s happening in each Member State. And this report today puts us on par with Hungary. Many media outlets in the Brussels bubble said yesterday that the two worst reports in terms of corruption were those of Hungary and Spain.

More specifically, in this comparison of corruption, what worries you most?

I think that the headline of this report is that absolutely nothing has been done that was requested last year. That’s the headline.

Obviously, the Commission also doesn’t have the capacity to intervene very effectively in the Member States, because that’s not its job. But it has been asking the Government of Spain for some time to make progress in the fight against corruption, in judicial independence, and above all as regards the Judiciary and the media.

"The Commission also doesn’t have the capacity to intervene very effectively in the Member States, because that’s not its job"

In three paragraphs it clearly states that there’s been no improvement. In some cases, it talks about a minor improvement, for example with respect to the State Attorney General, but this simply refers to a legislative proposal that hasn’t passed either Congress or the Senate.

We know it’s impossible for that to move ahead, because the Government doesn’t have a legislative majority. The European Commission also knows that. Therefore, my headline would be: "You’ve done absolutely nothing about what was asked of you last year."
 
The other big news in this area are the two rulings from the Court of Justice on amnesty. The Partido Popular has positioned itself by legally accepting the sentences, although it continues to disagree politically. How do you rate it?

First, you have to understand that what the CJEU did was to resolve a preliminary ruling. In other words, it has limited itself to resolving a doubt of the Spanish court regarding the European standard. It hasn’t assessed the amnesty law as a whole, nor has it resolved whether it’s compatible with Spanish legality – no matter how many media outlets are presenting it that way.

Second, this resolution isn’t the end of the road. It’s still the national courts who have the power to apply national law and determine whether it’s applicable to the specific case.

"The CJEU hasn’t assessed the amnesty law as a whole, nor has it resolved whether it’s compatible with Spanish legality"

That’s part of the whole process of this amnesty law, which is basically tailor-made for a man to stay in power thanks to seven votes, and where the Court of Justice hasn’t wanted to intrude. But it’s also true that two other questions addressing possible violations of the rule of law aren’t being asked.

The decisions we’ve received refer to the Court of Auditors’ preliminary ruling on embezzlement, and to the Directive on Terrorism, which affects the CDR committees. Two other questions that have a much greater impact on the scope of the rule of law remain absent.

I’m not saying that they’ll go forward, nor do I think they’ll go in another direction. The only thing I’m saying is that they’ve issued an opinion that we fully respect.

We’re not like other parties that point the finger and accuse judges. We have respect. But on a more personal level, I will say I know the EU Court of Justice very well, because I’ve heard from it every year as a former chairman of the Committee on Legal Affairs, and as a current member, and there’s a certain slip when it comes to considering what makes a government pro-European or not pro-European.

That type of interpretation of cases, depending on the government in each Member State, is going to age badly.
 
In your personal career, the relationship has been rather intense with Catalunya, the amnesty, and the independence movement in general. There are interpretations that argue that the amnesty may end up favoring the PP politically, because it would pave the way for a possible future understanding with Junts, which some consider inevitable. What do you think of that reading?

The only possible point of encounter between the PP and any other Spanish party is respect for the Constitution and the laws that we have given ourselves. If there’s no such respect, there can be no meeting.

"The only possible point of encounter between the PP and any other Spanish party is respect for the Constitution and the laws that we have given ourselves"

If that exists, then majorities are decided by the citizens with their votes. A serious, responsible political party with a ‘State and country’ mentality needs to work with a clear understanding of what the people decide and what they vote for, but with a red line: respect for the Constitution.

How should the relationship be managed between the Executive and the Judiciary?

I don’t think it should be managed. What must be done is to respect the separation of the spheres of action of each branch of the State. The Legislature has some powers; the Executive has others; and the Judiciary, others. They’re obviously linked, but if we have an Executive that doesn’t respect judicial decisions, we allow a drift where the separation of powers – which is the basis of any democratic State – begins to falter.

If the intended interpretation is the opposite – that there’s a Judiciary that blocks the decisions of the Legislative and Executive branches – I would ask what common, linear, and homogeneous interests run through the entire Spanish judiciary. Do all judges and prosecutors think the same way? Do they all have a political agenda?

Let’s take, for example, the latest cases that affect the President’s entourage. In the case of his brother, the Provincial Court of Badajoz has adopted a resolution unanimously. Now, the Provincial Court of Madrid has also unanimously said that there are indications of possible crimes in the case of the President’s wife, for having taken advantage of her husband’s position of power.

There’s a sector of the press – and this is the most troubling thing, because it’s what the ruling party is trying to promote – that tries to tell us that all the judicial organs of the State are aligned against the Government.

Is that possible? Is it viable? Is it really credible? Or is there instead an interest on the part of the Executive to control and point fingers? By the way, that’s what the Report on the Rule of Law takes note of: an enormous increase in complaints from all judicial associations due to pressures to try to influence their decisions.

Could there be a specific judge with an agenda? Sure. But in case after case, there’s unanimity or a large majority in definite legal opinions on the possibility of applying the amnesty... You can’t expect people to believe that there’s a political agenda behind everything.

"The Report on the Rule of Law notes an enormous increase in complaints from all judicial associations due to pressures to try to influence their decisions"

There’s nowhere to get a handle, and the Commission hasn’t believed it, either. In fact, one issue where the report has the greatest impact is in the huge concern over this accusation, and the increase in complaints from all judicial associations about interference from the Executive in their work.
 
In Agenda Pública we published an article where we analyzed the relationship between citizens’ ideologies and trust in justice. In Spain, people with a more conservative ideology tended to trust the judicial system more. But that pattern isn’t consistent across all countries: in Austria or Germany, for example, the further to the left a person stands, the greater confidence he or she expresses. Does this paradigm exist in other countries, or is it more typical of Spain?

Look, that question alone defines for me how the Government has managed to introduce ideological language into justice. Even those who work in the media get wrapped up in it, because we try to define an ideology within the judicial system. That’s the start.

I’m not referring to the ideology of the judges, but to the perceptions of the citizenry. That question has appeared in European Social Survey questionnaires since 2002.

But before, there was no such debate within public opinion. There was no public discussion about whether judges were on one side or the other.

The moment you start to define judges as being on one side or the other, you start to destroy judicial independence. When a decision is made that you don’t like, you say that the judge is right-wing or left-wing. This is how you penetrate the system and the rule of law, because you start to question the judges themselves.

If this is done by the Executive or the President of the Government, we’re already at the beginning of a very worrying drift. It’s as if I were asked whether I think the EU Court of Justice is left-wing because of what it says about amnesty. That doesn’t even enter my head. It’s a court – for me, it has no ideology. The first thing it does is apply the law, whether that’s the Civil Code, the Penal Code, or a corresponding regulation.

Taking the debate to the ideology of the Judiciary is the start of the deterioration of the system.

Again I insist: the fact that this has become a debate is what’s endangering the system. The debate has taken on this dimension because a President of the Government decided to take it to public opinion. Nothing like that had ever happened before.

"Taking the debate to the ideology of the Judiciary is the start of the deterioration of the system"

In some Eastern countries there’s a contrary perception, because a good number of their judges came from the communist system and were recycled into the democratic system. Those were judges appointed by a communist regime. That’s the debate in reverse.

In Spain, something similar could’ve been said in the 1980s, due to the legacy of Francoism. But a lot of time has passed, and the judicial system has completely regenerated.

For me, the mere fact of opening this debate is already dangerous. People aren’t aware of how dangerous it is.
 
You said that Spain hasn’t implemented any of the recommendations made by the European Commission the previous year. If you could adopt just one measure, so the next report would say that Spain is moving in the right direction, which would you choose?

If it’s only one, I would choose the total disconnection of the Attorney General’s Office from the Executive. For a simple reason: if you look at all the cases of corruption in Mr. Sánchez’s entourage, in all of them the Office of the Prosecutor has absolutely lost its good reputation.

Why? Because it’s following a political line, even in cases where unanimous decisions have been made by an entire court. They’ve destroyed the name of the State Attorney General’s Office.

"The first thing I’d do would be to take from the Executive the power to choose the State Attorney General, because that’s absolutely rotting the system"

We have the first State Attorney General in history being disqualified and firmly convicted. So the first thing I’d do would be to take from the Executive the power to choose the State Attorney General, because that’s absolutely rotting the system.

I’d do many more things, but that would be the first.

So this is a real concern for trust in the system?

Of course. I’ll go back to your previous question about whether judges are right-wing or left-wing, and the perceptions of the most conservative or most progressive citizens. In the end, those perceptions generate distrust in the judicial system.

If you sow doubts and distrust about the judicial system in a democracy, then everything starts to wobble. We have to understand: this is the last frontier – it’s what allows us to live under rules of common respect that we’ve given each other.

"If you sow doubts and distrust about the judicial system in a democracy, then everything starts to wobble"

If you decide to skip those rules because you want to stay in government for four years, and you invent a law to achieve that precise end; or if you think that your close associates, your wife or your brother, can benefit from your position of power; or if you colonize institutions like the CIS, or Radio Televisión Española – which also appears in the Report on the Rule of Law, where serious concern is expressed about the editorial line of public radio and television; and if you also attack the judges… You’re removing all the filters that guarantee balance between the three powers.

That’s the beginning of any authoritarian State. That’s how it starts.

Thank you very much.