Texte original publié par No es época para tontos.
What happens when the state can freeze your bank accounts almost immediately, but the justice system then leaves your case effectively inactive for 66 months?
This investigation begins with a real judicial case that exposes one of the most uncomfortable questions facing any democracy: how long can a person remain trapped inside a criminal investigation before delay itself becomes a form of punishment?
The proceedings began in March 2018 in connection with alleged money laundering. Bank accounts were frozen at the start of the investigation. Yet according to the ruling examined in this podcast, the case later accumulated 66 months of judicial inactivity, and one of the people investigated was not able to give a statement before the court until more than six years after the proceedings had started.
Eventually, the Constitutional Court found that the delay violated Article 10 of the Andorran Constitution, which protects the right to proceedings within a reasonable time. The Superior Court subsequently awarded €11,000 to each of three affected people, €33,000 in total, using a calculation of €2,000 for every year of unjustified delay. Additional compensation requested for moral suffering and legal costs was rejected.
But the podcast does not stop with one judicial file.
To understand how such a situation can occur, the investigation travels back to 1993, when Andorra adopted its modern Constitution and transformed a centuries-old political structure into a parliamentary co-principality based on popular sovereignty, constitutional rights and separation of powers. The episode reconstructs the historical transition from the medieval Pareatges to the constitutional state, examining why the Bishop of Urgell and the President of France remained as co-princes while political authority was transferred to democratic institutions.
The central question is whether that constitutional architecture works as intended more than thirty years later.
Particular attention is given to the Consell Superior de la Justícia (CSJ), the institution responsible for governing and administering the judicial system and safeguarding its independence. The programme examines the political controversy surrounding the appointment of Josep Maria Rossell as CSJ president after previously serving as Minister of Justice and Interior.
The transcript makes an important distinction: it does not present the appointment as unconstitutional. Instead, it examines a political criticism concerning the appearance of judicial independence. The argument discussed is whether an immediate transition from the executive branch to the leadership of judicial governance can affect public confidence, even when the appointment itself is legally permitted.
That debate leads directly to another major issue: the structure of the justice system itself.
The podcast examines a proposed 104-article reform dealing with the status of CSJ personnel, administrative organisation, financial autonomy, urgent procedures, mobility within the justice system, procedural nullity and judicial error. The underlying issue is simple but fundamental: judicial independence is not only about what a Constitution says. It also depends on who controls staff, budgets, resources and the administrative machinery that allows courts to function.
And then everything returns to the human cost.
A person can be presumed innocent in law while suffering severe consequences long before any trial takes place. Accounts can remain frozen. Businesses can be affected. Families can live for years under uncertainty. And when the system eventually recognises that the delay violated constitutional rights, financial compensation cannot restore the lost time.
The Andorran Constitution ultimately provided a mechanism for challenging the failure. The Constitutional Court intervened, the violation was recognised and compensation followed.
That matters.
But it also exposes the deeper question at the heart of this investigation:
Is justice really effective if a citizen must first lose five and a half years before the system acknowledges that the wait was unacceptable?
And in a world where money, communications and government decisions move almost instantly, how can a modern justice system justify timelines measured not in weeks or months, but in years?
Because there is a point at which delay stops being an administrative inconvenience.
There is a point at which the process itself begins to carry consequences similar to a sentence.
And that is the question this episode leaves open:
When justice takes 66 months to move, is it still merely delayed justice — or has the delay itself become the punishment?
