'Yes is yes', another legal incompetence

I have been warned by many lawyers that the so-called ‘yes yes law’ promoted by the Ministry of Equality to further punish sexual abuse and assault will in some cases lead to the opposite. And that’s how it started to happen. Different court decisions on this issue are already known. In one of these, the Madrid County Court revised downward the sentence of a person who sexually abused four minors, commuting his original sentence of six years and six months to one year in prison. Another prisoner saw his sentence reduced from six to four years. This is the result of the legal structure designed by the Ministry of Irene Montero with a minimal sense of legal technique, a systematic ideologization of any order, and its characteristic inability to make laws without any criteria of criminal logic.

Although they wanted to aggravate the abuse by equating certain behaviors with sexual assault, Equality only opened the door to reduced sentences for those who did not deserve it. If the Ministry’s will is not to decriminalize some abuses, it is incomprehensible that it would not choose to continue its criminal nature by placing the acts in another type of crime that differentiates them from each other. Likewise, it is the result of inadequate and thoughtless legislation being implemented too quickly, with propaganda criteria, and the unknowingly ignoring of the basic recommendations of the CGPJ, the Prosecutor’s Office or the Council of State. When all this becomes irrelevant to Equality, when political bias prevails over the calibration of any crime, real criminals are offered a lifeline to soften their behavior.

It won’t happen in all cases, and also the Courts should start to establish common criteria so that its implementation does not turn into a scandal. But the fault lies in the inadequate law, not ‘macho justice,’ as the Equality Department incomprehensibly said yesterday. Whenever judicial decisions come out that do not satisfy the government, instead of self-criticizing their sloppy legislation, they attack the courts and launch a new operation to discredit the judges. The Ministry of Equality argues that justice applies the law “regressively” and that it all stems from “a question of judicial voluntaristic interpretation against the advances of feminism.” These are serious affirmations because the Ministry has been warned of the legal loophole that the wording of its norm leads to substantial reductions in penalties. Irene Montero responded to criticism of her law on November 2nd: “Not a single reduction in fines will be known.” Now you know the first three.

His failure is everyone’s failure. It is not pleasing to see those convicted of sexual abuse and assault being released from prison for years in this way. What the judges cannot do is apply the rule arbitrarily simply because of social conditioning or because that is the desire of a minister. Let the legislator correct him if he is wrong and stop harassing the Courts with his ideological complexes. A government cannot cook justice as it pleases simply because it has a parliamentary majority. Consistency, proportionality and legal support are reasons to be respected, and this applies to sexual abuse, embezzlement of public funds, sedition or other crimes. Making laws that are illogical and purely for political interests has these insurmountable contradictions.

#legal #incompetence