A public prosecutor answerable to Parliament: a radical-centre plan for Spain's Attorney General

Miriam González asked in her launch speech for Democracia 21 for a prosecution service that answers to Parliament. It is a short phrase with a lot packed into it, and after the last two years in Spain it deserves to be taken seriously and worked out in detail.

How the Attorney General is chosen today

Article 124 of the Spanish Constitution says the Attorney General, the Fiscal General del Estado, is appointed by the King on the government's proposal, after hearing the General Council of the Judiciary. The same article organises prosecutors under unity of action and hierarchical dependence, so whoever sits at the top shapes how the whole service behaves. The Statute of the prosecution service, Law 50/1981, fills in the rest. Candidates must be jurists with more than fifteen years of experience. Since a 2024 reform, nobody who has been a minister, MP, senior regional official or mayor in the previous five years can be proposed. Congress can call the candidate to a committee hearing to assess merit and suitability, and that is all: there is no vote. The term is four years, and one of the grounds for leaving office is the departure of the government that made the proposal.

Put plainly, the government picks the person who leads the prosecution of crimes, including crimes that may involve the government, and that person's mandate lives and dies with the government. GRECO, the Council of Europe's anti-corruption body, said in 2022 that this method of selection and term remain a long-standing concern for the perceived autonomy of the service, and asked Spain to reconsider both and to make communications between the Attorney General and the government more transparent. The European Commission has repeated a similar recommendation in its Rule of Law reports since then: separate the Attorney General's term from the government's.

Then the problem stopped being theoretical. On 20 November 2025 the Supreme Court sentenced Álvaro García Ortiz, the sitting Attorney General, to two years' disqualification and a fine for revealing confidential information about Alberto González Amador. It was the first time a serving Attorney General had been put on trial. He resigned on 24 November and the government appointed Teresa Peramato, a career prosecutor since 1990, on 9 December, with the unanimous backing of the judicial council. García Ortiz and the Attorney General's office have appealed to the Constitutional Court.

The bill in Parliament, and what Europe does

The government has its own answer. The new Criminal Procedure Law, approved by the Council of Ministers on 28 October 2025, moves the direction of criminal investigations from investigating judges to prosecutors, with a new judge of guarantees to supervise them, and gives the Attorney General a single five-year term that no longer coincides with the government's. It also requires the government to consult the judicial council before dismissing the Attorney General for serious failures. The Commission calls this significant progress. The bill was still under discussion in Parliament in July 2026, and it would only take effect in 2028.

That bill fixes the term and leaves the choice where it is. And the shift of investigations to prosecutors makes the choice more important, because the Attorney General would sit atop the people running every criminal inquiry in the country, including those into politicians.

Europe offers some useful reference points. Portugal's Constitution sets a six-year term for its Prosecutor General. In 2019 the EU Court of Justice ruled that German prosecutors cannot issue European arrest warrants, because they are exposed to the risk of instructions in specific cases from a justice minister, which is a reminder that ministerial control has legal costs. And the EU built its own prosecutor from scratch: under Regulation 2017/1939, a selection panel draws up a shortlist and the European Parliament and the Council choose the European Chief Prosecutor by common accord, for a single seven-year term.

The radical-centre design

Each tradition gets something essential right here. The left wants prosecutors with the means and the backing to go after powerful people, and it wants their priorities set and scrutinised in the open by elected representatives. The right and the liberal tradition want a prosecution service the executive cannot steer, with fixed terms and legal certainty for everyone under investigation. The idea from neither camp is to separate answerability from instruction. Parliament can ask the Attorney General to explain priorities, resources and results. Nobody, in Parliament or in government, can tell them what to do with a case.

So here is the plan. An independent panel, made up of senior prosecutors and judges chosen by their peers, academics and a member named by the Ombudsman, runs an open call and publishes a shortlist of three to five candidates with its reasons, as the EU does for its own prosecutor. Congress chooses from that list by three-fifths after a public hearing, which keeps any single majority from imposing its candidate. If Congress has not chosen within three months, the panel's top-ranked candidate is appointed, so a blockade like the one the judicial council suffered can't happen. The term is a single six years, longer than a legislature, as in Portugal.

Dismissal is possible only on grounds set out in the law, such as a final criminal conviction or serious breach of duty, after a report from the judicial council and a vote of Congress by the same three-fifths. Once a year the Attorney General presents to Congress the service's criminal-policy priorities, its budget needs and its results, and answers questions on them. Every contact between the government and the Attorney General's office about specific matters is recorded and published after the case ends, which answers GRECO's transparency point. And if prosecutors take over investigations in 2028, the budget law has to give them the posts and means to do it before the switch.

This is what answering to Parliament can mean without turning the prosecution service into a trophy for whichever majority controls Congress. Karl Popper, whose Open Society we explain today, wanted institutions in which bad officials can be removed by rules agreed in advance. Francis Fukuyama, explained on day 8, insists that the rule of law means the law binds the rulers too. A prosecutor chosen through a panel, confirmed by a broad majority, protected from instructions and called to account every year meets both tests.