Madrid (EFE).- While the strike by court officials continues, judges and prosecutors sit down again this afternoon with Justice and the Treasury to negotiate an increase in their salaries, which range, on average, between 51,946 gross euros per year at the beginning of the race and the 130,654 at the end of it, in the highest positions.
These are the figures collected in the latest report carried out by the Council of Europe on the judicial systems of the continent, based on data from 2020.
According to this study, judges and prosecutors in Spain earn twice the average salary in the country at the beginning of their career and, at the end, 5.4 times more.
The salaries of these professionals are regulated by a specific law, from 2003, which aims to “guarantee the economic independence” of judges, a treatment that is extended to prosecutors “in view of the relevance of their functions.”
There are around 5,400 judges and 2,700 prosecutors in Spain and the aforementioned law sets basic remuneration -salary and seniority- and complementary -destination and specific complement-, to which variable remuneration by objectives can be added.
The lowest salary, which the Council of Europe study figures at 51,946, would correspond to a judge at the beginning of his career. In any case, it is an average, which many judges who work in small towns do not reach, warn legal sources.
The remunerations increase with the passing of the years and the destinations and, for example, a president of the room in a provincial audience with 12 trienniums behind him currently earns 5,080 euros a month net, with fourteen payments.
According to the latest general State budget for this year, the remuneration of a Supreme Court magistrate amounts to 124,202 euros gross per year, plus two extraordinary payments of 7,826 euros.
Negotiations under threat of strike
After two meetings without an agreement, the main associations of judges and prosecutors maintain their strike call for next Tuesday, May 16, and this Wednesday they return to the Ministry of Justice to continue negotiations at the compensation table.
The first offer from the Government, which proposed last week to allocate 44.5 million euros to improve the salaries of both careers, was considered insufficient by the associations, which still trust in the “responsibility” of the ministries involved to improve the proposal and avoid unemployment.
Sources from the judicial associations consulted by EFE allege that they have not recovered 4.73% of the basic salaries they had in 2010, after the cut they suffered that year that the rest of the civil servants recovered, and they assure that their purchasing power has decreased by a 20% on average since 2004.
Among their demands stands out the request to improve the remuneration of the guards. There are 85 unique first instance and instruction courts that receive less than 50 gross cents per hour on duty and some 1,400 judges, 25% of the career, receive on average less than 3 euros gross.
It is not the only labor conflict that Justice has in its hands, since the officials of the courts maintain their strikes and begin today their tenth day of strike, exacerbating the accumulated traffic jam after the lawyers of the Justice administration went on strike for two months and managed to increase their salaries up to 450 euros gross per month.
The CSIF, STAJ, CCOO and UGT unions demand a salary increase for 45,000 officials of between 350 and 430 euros and maintain the strikes called for May 11, 16, 17 and 18. This noon they will gather in front of the Ministry of Justice.
According to his figures, more than 5 million administrative files and tens of thousands of trials have already been paralyzed.