Almudena Alvarez |
Palencia (EFE).- Free legal assistance is a constitutional right that protects people with fewer resources, regardless of where they live, but it is not the same to provide this service in Barcelona than in Palencia, Soria, Zamora, Teruel or Cuenca.
In depopulated Spain, it means more difficulty for lawyers, who are fewer and less well paid, and inequality also creeps into the office shift.
The phone rings at three in the afternoon, they have arrested a driver who was driving drunk and faster than the speed allowed by the A-67, in Aguilar de Campoo (Palencia), or at midnight because there has been a fight in a drinking area in Guardo, 100 kilometers from the capital.
Without charging for availability or travel
The lawyer Miguel Hermosa has been in the Public Office for ten years and now manages it as dean of the Palencia Bar Association.
“When you are on call you have to be available 24 hours a day, in a place where there is coverage and with a full car tank, in case they call you. If they call you, you charge for assistance, which does not include travel. If they don’t call, you don’t charge anything. It is the only public service that does not pay for availability during guards ”, summarizes this lawyer from Palencia to EFE.
The situation is repeated every day, 365 days a year, in the province of Palencia or in Soria, Zamora, Teruel or Cuenca.
Free Justice is a citizen’s right that lawyers provide voluntarily, but providing it in depopulated Spain entails greater difficulties than doing so in large cities and, generally, worse considerations.
To begin with, in Palencia there are 240 practicing lawyers, of whom less than half (108) provide the Office Shift and assistance to the detainee, in addition to services in gender violence, legal guidance and legal assistance to the inmates of the Penitentiary Center of Owners. The province has 160,000 inhabitants, three judicial demarcations and distances of up to 120 kilometers from the capital.
A lawyer on duty for all of Palencia
“We are a small school that provides services in emptied Spain,” Miguel Hermosa told EFE while clarifying what that entails, because the schools process and manage the Office Shift and they do it with very few staff (the one in Palencia has two workers ) and an excessive volume of work (1,754 Free Justice files in 2022).
In addition, the college establishes the on-call calendar so that there is not a single blank day and so that courts and State security forces and bodies know which telephone number to dial and which lawyer to call each day of the year.
In the case of the province of Palencia, there will only be one lawyer on duty (sufficient amount for the Ministry of Justice based on crime rates), which will make it really difficult to go to Cervera de Pisuerga and be at the same time in Carrión de Los Condes or in Palencia if you have to respond to several calls and carry out different procedures, with kilometers of distance in between and inclement weather in winter.
“Providing assistance in San Salvador de Cantamuda involves more than an hour and a half of travel,” says Hermosa.
In addition, the lawyers have to bring their own car and do not charge travel expenses, diets or mileage.
They ask that the Free Justice Law be reformed
That is why the demands of the Spanish Bar Associations, the Autonomous Councils and their General Council are so important so that the Free Justice Law is reformed and there is an agreement that improves the conditions in which professionals provide this public service.
“But it is also necessary to take into account the territorial and population differences to provide the quality service that all citizens deserve because it is not the same to organize guards in Palencia, with a small population and many distances, than in Seville or Madrid, with much more population and many more judicial districts”, explains Hermosa.
Added to the difficulties that professionals face on a day-to-day basis in rural Spain, emptied and depopulated, are the salaries, with much lower scales in the territory of the Ministry of Justice, that is, in communities that have not transferred powers .
In Catalonia or the Basque Country you can pay twice as much as in Palencia for the same service. In the ministry territory, and therefore in Castilla y León but also in Castilla-La Mancha, Murcia, Extremadura, Ceuta and Melilla, the monetary range ranges between 70 and 405 euros depending on the procedure.
“We want an equalization and that the service we provide is remunerated in a dignified way,” insists Hermosa, who wants to make it clear that the claims are not only economic and warns that with the current conditions and the differences that exist between the territories, the risk runs risk that there are fewer and fewer lawyers who voluntarily want to provide this service.