Specialised anti-corruption courts: what works in Europe, and a radical-centre plan for Spain

Among the clean-up measures in Democracia 21's launch speech was a call for specialised courts for corruption, coordinated with each other and given the means to work. The diagnosis behind it is hard to argue with. Spain's large corruption cases take so long that by the time a final ruling arrives, the politicians involved have often left the scene, and the public has stopped expecting anything.

How slow is slow

The Gürtel case, the network of kickbacks around the Partido Popular, began in August 2008. The Audiencia Nacional delivered its judgment on the first period of the case in May 2018, and the Supreme Court confirmed it in October 2020, in a ruling of 1,843 pages. That is twelve years. The ERE case in Andalusia, over some 680 million euros of public money, started with an investigation in January 2011; the Seville court ruled in November 2019 and the Supreme Court confirmed the core of the ruling in July 2022. In one Gürtel strand, the one dealing with the Bárcenas papers, the Supreme Court reduced sentences for undue delay because five years had passed between the end of the investigation and the trial. Slow justice punishes the public, and it also punishes defendants who wait a decade under suspicion.

The system does produce results. According to the CGPJ's corruption data, which it has published every quarter since 2017, judges sent 114 people and 13 companies to trial or indicted them for corruption in 2025, and of 71 corruption judgments, 52, or 73 per cent, were full or partial convictions. Spain has had a specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office since 1995, and the Audiencia Nacional hears serious economic crimes that gravely harm the national economy. The European Commission's 2025 Rule of Law report noted more resources for corruption investigations and two new posts in the anti-corruption prosecutor's office, while warning that newly created specialised prosecution chambers risk duplicating it. The government's own State Plan against Corruption, approved in August 2025, includes specialised sections in each first-instance court, more posts for the anti-corruption prosecutors and a new independent public integrity agency.

What Europe has learned

Europe has run the experiment several times. The U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre in Bergen, which has mapped these courts since 2016, counts 27 of them worldwide. Its main finding is sobering: the most common reason for creating one is frustration with the slowness of ordinary justice, yet missing case-processing deadlines is more likely the norm than the exception, and reformers should not overpromise. A court is a link in a chain that runs through police and prosecutors, and the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Judges, U4 insists, have to be chosen for their integrity above all.

The country cases bear this out. Slovakia's specialised criminal court, set up in 2003, worked well against organised crime and local corruption but issued very few convictions for corruption at the top, largely because of the prosecutors, a Harvard-U4 case study found. In February 2024 Robert Fico's government abolished the Special Prosecutor's Office and cut penalties for economic crimes, including corruption. Bulgaria closed its specialised criminal court in July 2022, after criticism that it had been captured by the political interests of Boyko Borisov's government. Croatia has run USKOK, a national prosecutor's office for corruption and organised crime, since 2001, with dedicated court departments since 2009. Romania's anti-corruption prosecutors secured 391 convictions in 2024, while 307 defendants escaped trial because the limitation period ran out.

The most striking case is Ukraine. Its High Anti-Corruption Court, whose 38 judges took office in April 2019, was staffed through a process in which a panel of six international experts could veto doubtful candidates; of 49 candidates flagged, 39 dropped out. In July 2025 the Ukrainian parliament passed a law that curbed the independence of the anti-corruption bureau and prosecutors, and nine days later, after protests across the country, it restored it by 331 votes to none. The lesson there is that independent anti-corruption bodies survive when citizens see them as theirs.

The EU has now set a floor. Directive 2026/1021 on combating corruption, published in May 2026, leaves specialised courts to each member state's choice and requires enough qualified staff and resources, specialised training and minimum limitation periods. Spain has until 2028 to transpose it.

The radical-centre plan

Each tradition has a point here. The left sees corruption as theft from the public and wants the state to put serious resources into prosecuting it, whoever is involved. The right and the market-liberal tradition see slow justice as bad justice, costly for taxpayers and investors and unfair to the innocent. Fukuyama's frame, which we explained on day 8, adds the part that fits neither camp: the rule of law depends on state capacity, which means designing the whole chain as one system.

So we would build on the government's own idea of specialised sections inside the new first-instance courts and add what the evidence says they need. Judges for those sections are selected on merit, with integrity checks run by a panel that includes outside experts, as Ukraine did, and they rotate after a fixed term so no network forms around them. The sections share one digital case file with the anti-corruption prosecutors and specialised police units. Each case gets a public timetable, and the CGPJ publishes, case by case, how long each phase took. Macro-cases are split into separate pieces once the investigation allows it, so that one stalled strand does not freeze the rest. The transposition of the directive is the moment to set limitation periods long enough for complex cases. And if prosecutors take over criminal investigations under the reform now in Parliament, which we discuss in today's piece on the prosecution service, the anti-corruption office gets its new posts before the switch.

Finally, start where the problem is worst and measure. Launch the sections in a few judicial districts, publish their times and results against comparable districts for two years, then extend what works. That is Karl Popper's piecemeal method, explained today, applied to justice: a reform that proves itself with data will also be much harder for a future government to dismantle, as Slovakia's and Bulgaria's were.