Madrid, Spain, Aug 14, 2005 / 22:00 pm
The General Council of the Judiciary in Spain has said it will ask the Ministry of Justice to force the general director of Registrars and Notaries, Pilar Blanco-Morales, to retract the “very serious comments” she made against two justices of the peace who challenged the constitutionality of the country’s new law on homosexual “marriage.”
At the beginning of August, Blanco-Morales called the actions by the two officials of Denia (Alicante) and Telde (Canary Islands) “unstable,” “profoundly anti-democratic” and said they were driven by “ideological purposes.”
The Council described it as “very serious” that a Socialist official of the Ministry of Justice would accuse the justices of favoring a political party (referring to the opposition party “Partido Popular”) and “refusing to carry out a law validly approved by Parliament,” just because they questioned its constitutionality.
After meeting last Friday, when her statements still had not been retracted, the General Council expressed “its strongest rejection” of the comments by Blanco-Morales and said they were “reprehensible in and of themselves, and especially if they are coming from a high official of the Ministry of Justice who ought to show due respect for judges and courts.”