ACCYDED - Citizens Association Against Corruption and for the Defense of the Rule of Law
I am astonished to read, on the front page of the country's best-selling newspaper, that in China a person has been jailed for 400 days for their ideas. And I wonder when I will read in those same pages that the Kingdom of Spain has kept a judge who reported judicial corruption behind bars for 1,193 days.
For years judges have been raised to an almost divine status: they decide what is just and what is not, sometimes even against the letter of the law. But when the guardians of the rules step away from them, citizens are left disoriented and trust collapses. We may be witnessing the twilight of the robed gods.
The image of a country is the reflection of its justice. When the power charged with enforcing the law withdraws into itself, shields its own and punishes those who speak out, justice ceases to be a universal value and becomes the privilege of a few. That is the mirror in which Spain should dare to look at itself.
When we travel, the first thing we ask is whether we can walk the streets in peace. Spain usually passes that test. But there is another kind of insecurity, quieter and just as dangerous, that no uniformed patrol can tackle: the one citizens feel when they walk into a courtroom and discover that the law does not always protect them.
In May 2025 a Supreme Court judge argued in a newspaper that justice must free itself from political shackles. He is right, but does not go far enough. Politicisation of the judiciary is not the disease but a symptom: the real malady is the submission of every institution to interests that have nothing to do with the law.
A police inspector specialising in drug trafficking lives under constant scrutiny, even in private life, because of the risk of corruption. A judge ruling on multimillion-euro cases faces no comparable check on his or her assets. How does that asymmetry square with the equality before the law proclaimed by the Constitution and by treaties that prevail in Spain?
Obeying the law is not optional. Yet many of our institutions behave as if their duties were mere options, to be exercised or ignored at will. Transparency rulings nobody enforces, watchdogs that take years to be born, judgments without reasons: when public service demands rigour, citizens get laxity instead. Is it legal ignorance, or a strategy of impunity?
Distrust, detachment, indifference. That is how many citizens relate to those who are supposed to serve them. It is neither whim nor apathy: it is the logical response to years of opacity, patronage, sterile bureaucracy and a justice system seen as partisan. Is any public authority still fully honest and bound by the law? Citizens' experience suggests a troubling answer.
The ancient Greeks called it isonomy: equality before the law. Article 14 of the Spanish Constitution proclaims it, yet reality contradicts it every day. Mass immunities, unlawful rulings nobody corrects and a judiciary that judges itself have created an untouchable caste. If ordinary citizens are bound by the law, why are those who apply it not?
Dictatorships and absolute monarchies concentrate power in one person or a small elite; nobody disputes that. What is disturbing is that many formal democracies reproduce the same logic behind a pluralist facade: leaderships that decide, subordinates who obey and tamed checks and balances. Concentrated power, corruption and no accountability. Is Spain a horizontal democracy or a disguised hierarchy?
Forty years after joining Europe, Spain is still a partner that promises much and delivers by halves. Multi-million fines from the Court of Justice, directives transposed late, mismanaged funds and unpaid arbitration awards form a disturbing pattern. The acquis is not a menu: it is a commitment. What is it with our authorities, European law and money?
Four decades after an organic law multiplied procedural privileges for officeholders, the truth is starting to break through. When power breaches the rules of the rule of law to silence those who report corruption, history shows that a turning point is near. Impunity has a date of birth, and more and more citizens know it.
The Constitution requires fundamental rights to be interpreted always in favour of the individual. Spain has signed the major human rights treaties and accepts international courts. So why must a citizen go to Luxembourg to claim something as basic as equality before the law? The answer exposes the gulf between what is written and what is done.
European and national institutions fear the arrival of artificial intelligence in citizens' hands. We wanted to find out why, so we put a simple question to this "cursed tool": what do you call more than forty years of failure to guarantee citizens' equality before the law? Its blunt answer should shame those who have allowed, encouraged or promoted it.
Constitutional law textbooks put it plainly: a constitutional court exists to subject politics to law, to protect minorities from the majorities of the moment and the majority from powerful minorities. But what happens when the guardian of the Constitution refuses even to examine a privilege that flatly contradicts the equality of all before the law?
We were taught that Spain's historical constitutions were "programmatic", mere statements of good intentions, whereas the 1978 Constitution is "normative": it genuinely binds every public authority. Really? When equality before the law allows exceptions for thousands of officeholders, it is fair to ask whether we changed the model or merely the packaging.