Lawyers on Strike

(Province of Granada) Granada’s lawyers have decided to suspend their services to the state as abogados de turno de servicio; i.e., defence lawyers appointed and paid for by the state where the defendant is unable to pay his own legal fees.

They did warn the Junta de Andalucia that they would take this action, back in July, but as this threat apparently wasn’t taken seriously, they announced that they had withdrawn their services until the Junta pays them what they owe; the College of Lawyers says that the Junta has only paid them 25% of what they owe them to date.

Furthermore, they will not be offering free legal advice between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, to people who have been arrested and are in detention in police cells.

The problem appears to have been sparked by a change of conditions laid down by the Junta, in an attempt to cut costs. There also appeared to be a disparity between the hours that the lawyers filed for and the hours that they actually did.

Under the previous system, the lawyer would need to ‘sign in’ at the law court, or police station every time that they carried out a service, which is something that they were lax over, resulting in 3,165 certificates of assistance that had not been signed.

Based on the signed certificates, rather than the services actually carried out, the Junta reduced the required number of lawyers for this duty from 23 to 18. The college argues that this has worsened the ‘quality of the service.’ What this means for prisoners is that they spend more time languishing behind bars before a defence lawyer eventually turns up.

The Junta, on the other hand, through the Delegate for the Andaluz Government, Maria Jose Sanchez, says that all payments have been correctly made, barring those corresponding to July and August, which are in the pipeline.

She feels that the situation is not ‘reasonable’ in an institutional relationship and hopes that the College of Lawyers ‘rectifies’ its stance and the problem finds a solution very soon.

(News: Province of Granada, Andalucia)

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