A Toledo prosecutor has gone to the Supreme Court considering that she has suffered "a very serious situation of gender-based harassment" by her boss and the State Attorney General's Office. With a high-risk pregnancy, she confronted her chief prosecutor when he demanded that she dispatch all pending matters even though she was on medical leave.
The prosecutor did not do so because she considered it illegal, the General Prosecutor's Office filed and sanctioned it for a serious lack of unjustified delays and the affected party has now asked the High Court to annul the fine imposed by the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz. He considers that she has been sanctioned for "having dared to question a manifestly illegal order of her chief prosecutor."
According to the recording, to which EL MUNDO has had access, on June 17, 2021, the appellant went to the office of the Provincial Chief Prosecutor of Toledo, Antonio Huélamo Buendía, to inform him that the doctor had given her sick leave for high risk pregnancy. The woman explained that she was 18 weeks pregnant and that given her age -45 years- it had been a few days since they had given her the results of some medical tests and that was when they had confirmed that "things could go ahead." ».
The chief Provincial Prosecutor of Toledo, upon receiving the news of the sick leave and the reason for it, ordered the woman to continue working at home, in order to dispatch "her lot." The conversation - lasting more than an hour - reveals that when the prosecutor told her that she had "about forty grades pending" to her hierarchical superior, he replied the following: "What you have entered until today you leave dispatched" . The prosecutor asked her "how was she going to leave dispatched" all the pending matters if she had signed the discharge the next day. "Already. But what has entered you until today you have to leave dispatched, "his boss insisted again.
Throughout the conversation, the chief prosecutor of Toledo repeated on different occasions that "when someone has a leave, the work that has entered before the leave has to be done until it is dispatched." He assured that it was the "norm" to the woman's surprise and went so far as to ask an official to corroborate if it was customary in her Prosecutor's Office to leave all matters dispatched before taking medical leave.
The prosecutor, surprised, pointed out again that this was illegal and the official named Mercedes stressed that "always" was done like this in the Provincial Prosecutor's Office of Toledo. «I am only asking you one thing that is usual here. That the people who unsubscribe until the day the paper comes in, finish it, "repeated the provincial chief prosecutor.
The prosecutor explained to Huélamo Buendía that her health was at risk, that what she was proposing had no legal support and that she also had a significant work overload. "Other Prosecutors will do whatever, but here before you were discharged the work was yours and you have to do it (...) You have to dispatch it because you are supposed to have it finished today," said the boss.
Throughout the conversation, the prosecutor reminds her superior that he himself stated that "the work could be distributed among several prosecutors" at the same time that he reproached him that "nothing has been done." "I haven't had any kind of help for a year and a half," the woman added.
At the end of the meeting, the chief prosecutor tried to back down and admitted that "I cannot tell someone who is on leave to work" but immediately he returned to the charge and told the pregnant woman that "the most similar case is that of a person cease. Can he continue working after ceasing in matters of that Prosecutor's Office? No. Do you do them? Yeah".
The prosecutor, who considered that she could not be forced to continue working when she had been given medical leave due to the risk involved in her pregnancy, sent an email to the Tax Inspectorate, where she explained that her boss had given her the verbal order to “working from home despite being on medical leave.” The Inspection, which reports to García Ortiz, did not respond to that query made by the affected person. The woman sent a second email and made different calls that were not answered by this department either.
On July 14, 2021, when the prosecutor was on medical leave, the chief prosecutor of Toledo informed the Inspectorate of the delays in the processing of various judicial files on the pregnant woman. As reflected in the decree signed by the State Attorney General, where she is sanctioned for a serious breach of payment of a fine of 1,500 euros, the prosecutor had 28 civil matters and 168 criminal matters pending dispatch on the date of her discharge. .
The attorney general sanctioned the prosecutor for the "relevance of the delay" admitting that "most" of the pending cases were from the last four months when they were detected, that is, in the period in which the woman had already found pregnant. In the decree, García Ortiz maintains that "the facts declared proven clearly reveal the existence of a considerable, repeated and unjustified temporary breach in the dispatch of the entrusted procedures." The prosecutor, defended by the lawyers Juan Antonio Frago (prosecutor on leave) and Verónica Suárez, has challenged this sanction before the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court, considering that she has suffered a situation of "harassment" due to the mere fact of to be a woman. It should be noted that the appellant was never warned of any delay by the chief prosecutor of Toledo until she was given medical leave due to her risky pregnancy.
Informative proceedings. In October 2021, the Fiscal Inspection directed by the prosecutor María Antonia Sanz initiated informative proceedings against the prosecutor after receiving a report from the chief prosecutor of Toledo, Antonio Huélamo Buendía.
Proceedings. In May 2022, the lieutenant prosecutor of the Supreme Court -replacing Attorney General Álvaro García Ortiz- initiates a disciplinary proceeding against the prosecutor and proposes to punish her for a serious misdemeanor.
Fine for serious misconduct. On October 19, 2022, the State Attorney General sanctions the woman with a fine of 1,500 euros for "unjustifiably delaying the dispatch of matters." The prosecutor has asked the TS to annul the aforementioned disciplinary sanction.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
