Demand a public offer at least equivalent to counteract this departure of prosecutors
MADRID, 2 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Association of Prosecutors (AF) -the majority in the prosecutor’s career- has warned this Wednesday that over the next decade it is expected that about 19% of the prosecutors who are currently in office will retire, a ” hole” that has predicted that it will have “unacceptable” effects, for which he has called to counteract it with an equivalent offer of seats.
The AF has presented a study, collected by Europa Press, where it estimates that “in the next decade (from 2023 to 2032 both included) those born between 1953 and 1962 will reach the legal retirement age, which implies the retirement of a total number of 488 prosecutors, that is, 18.98% of the total workforce”.
“To this should be added the set of prosecutors born in 1951 and 1952 who had requested to remain in active service up to 72 years, which brings the figure to a total of 511 prosecutors,” he adds.
Likewise, it indicates that “this progression continues to increase in such a way that, if the forecast is also extended to the following five years (until 2037), in the next 15 years one in three prosecutors will have retired.”
The AF warns that it is “a big hole in the staff of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which can only be avoided with adequate foresight, since, if the large number of retirements that will take place is not counteracted with a public offer of vacancies At least equivalent, the pernicious effects for the proper functioning of this constitutional body and, ultimately, for the public service, will be unaffordable”.
For the AF, this “progressive reduction in the form of pensions” is “a serious problem that, once detected, requires planning from this very moment in order to be solved.” In this regard, he warns that “the average number of places offered in the last decade (77) will be of little use”, which he calculates would have to be doubled or tripled to avoid “the possible collapse that can occur in the fiscal career if a large part of its active members go into retirement”.
This study takes as its starting point the general career ladder of the prosecutor, closed on March 15, 2021 and approved by a resolution of March 16, 2021 of the General Directorate for the Public Service of Justice.
The AF points out that, if these data are compared with the previous decade (from 2012 to 2021, both included, taking in this case the list closed as of December 31, 2011 as a reference), “the prosecutors who reached the legal retirement age in that period, that is, those born between 1942 and 1951, were only 107, less than 5% (4.85%) of the race”.
The association explains that “this very low rate has made it very easy to cover vacancies with not very generous calls for places” because “not even 80 places per year have been necessary to control this phenomenon.”
By prosecutors, the AF has detailed that there are “really worrying” cases such as those of the Madrid and Zaragoza prosecutors. In Madrid, during the next decade “21.91% of prosecutors (39) will have reached retirement age, reaching 39.88% in 15 years”, while in the Aragonese capital it will affect 32.25% in ten years and 77.42% if the following five years are taken into account.
“The same happens if we look at the staff of the Barcelona Provincial Prosecutor’s Office, in which 21.25% of prosecutors (27) will reach retirement age, reaching 48.81% in 15 years,” he says.
The Association of Prosecutors also mentions the situation in the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office of Seville, “where the figure is 23.33% of the prosecutors (14), increasing to 46.66% in 15 years.”
