The duty roster loses lawyers while free justice breaks activity records

PalmaThe Illustrious College of Lawyers of the Balearic Islands (ICAIB) has warned of the sustained trickle of lawyers leaving the public defender service, despite the fact that the free justice service broke a record last year with more than 70,000 actions, a figure that represents an average of about 192 interventions per day.

On the occasion of the Day of Free Justice and the Public Defender Service, which is commemorated on July 7, the dean of the professional College, Martín Aleñar, explained at a press conference that nearly 28,000 of these actions correspond to assistance to detained persons, while the rest are distributed among summary trials, judicial proceedings, and other actions.

Aleñar has once again called on the Ministry of Justice for more resources and an improvement in the conditions of lawyers, while also expressing his concern about the decrease in the number of lawyers registered for the public defender service. According to him, this reduction is 12% in the last five years, a situation that is not compensated by new intakes.

The ICAIB representative pointed out that this service provides an average of eight actions every hour and recalled that five years ago it had 721 lawyers, while last year the figure had dropped to 634. However, he stressed that the free justice service continues to be covered, although he warned that the current situation cannot be ignored.

The dean has attributed this decrease to the "constant mistreatment" that, he said, public defenders suffer from the Ministry of Justice. Among the main problems, he pointed out low and delayed compensation, the slowness of Justice, an ever-increasing workload, and, more recently, the effects derived from the implementation of the Efficiency Law, which, he assured, far from improving the situation, has worsened it.

For her part, the vice-president of the ICAIB, Carmen López, has stated that the professionals providing this service are experiencing a situation of exhaustion and has warned that many of those who leave the public defender's office are lawyers with a long career and extensive experience in this field, who decide to leave due to the deterioration of the conditions.

López has also criticized the application of the Efficiency Law, considering that it has not been accompanied by the necessary human and material resources, especially in the phase prior to the judicial process, a deficiency that, in his opinion, ends up affecting citizens with fewer resources. "Without advocacy there is no justice and without a duty roster there is no rule of law," stated the vice-dean.

Furthermore, the ICAIB has called for a reform of the Free Legal Assistance Law that recognizes all the actions carried out by lawyers on the duty roster, both in the judicial and extrajudicial spheres, and that contributes to dignifying their work.

Finally, both Aleñar and López have warned that the lack of judges, officials, and technological resources keeps Justice "on the edge" and "on the verge of collapse," with hearings set for several years in advance and frequent incidents in the IT systems that, as they have denounced, "far from being isolated episodes, have become the daily routine." In this regard, they have lamented that "this very week there have been several days when the intranet used by professionals to coordinate with the courts has stopped working".