After the latest information related to the lawyers of La Rioja and the delay in payments in the last quarter of 2024, the delegate of the Government in La Rioja, Beatriz Arraiz Nalda, has clarified that this delay is not, in any case, due to a problem between the Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Courts and the regional Executive, as affirmed by the General Directorate of Interior in the letter that it sent to the Bar Association.
Arraiz Nalda has insisted that the Government of La Rioja is the only competent Administration for this, although he makes it an excuse for this delay that the Ministry has not transferred the corresponding funds. “We can confirm that the excuses of the Government of La Rioja are false, at least in everything that has to do with the transfer of funds from the Government of Spain because the competent Administration of it is exclusively the Autonomous Community,” he said.
In this way, it has specified that the Autonomous Community of La Rioja approved Decree 45/2017 of 3 November, approving the Regulation on Free Legal Assistance, which, among other issues, regulates the modules and economic bases for the remuneration of lawyers and prosecutors for the planned professional actions aimed at those who are beneficiaries of the right to free legal assistance.
Article 48 of the Constitution states: 'The Department responsible for Justice will compensate financially from its budgetary allocations the actions corresponding to the implementation and provision of legal aid services free of charge by the Bar Association and by the College of Attorneys within the Autonomous Community of La Rioja'.
He also added that, if you consult the section of the Government of La Rioja’s website on free legal assistance, in the section “Frequently asked questions”, we can find: ‘Who pays the Public Defender’s fees? The Government of La Rioja, through the competent Ministry of Justice, from the annual budget that it has established to provide this public service’.
Therefore, Arraiz Nalda has explained that there is no budget item from the Government of Spain to that of La Rioja on this concept because the autonomous community has transferred the competences in Justice.
In addition, it has confirmed that the autonomous communities that do not have this transfer of justice, already paid the amount corresponding to the last quarter of 2024 to court-appointed lawyers in February.
“We are therefore faced with a Government in La Rioja that is incapable of managing correctly and with a lack of foresight to face up to the payments due to it in May 2025 for a service for citizenship as important as that performed by public attorneys,” he said.
For all these reasons, he has called on the Government of La Rioja to offer timely and truthful explanations. “The citizens and lawyers of La Rioja do not want a regional executive that deceives them; they want one that assumes their mistakes, if there have been any, and corrects them,” he said.
Lack of institutional loyalty
In addition, Arraiz Nalda stressed that “the Delegation of the Government of Spain in La Rioja has always demonstrated its institutional loyalty to the autonomous community, regardless of its political color, for the interest of the citizens and the region.” Therefore, the delegate has expressed the opinion that institutional loyalty is not demonstrated by evading one responsibility and blaming another Administration when it is false.
“Nor is it institutional loyalty,” he concluded, “to recognize and value that it has been possible to build a cycle lane between Logroño and Lardero thanks to the contribution of almost one million euros from the Government of Spain, through the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. “To inaugurate a cycle lane they do not remember this Delegation, but they do so to try to evade their responsibility and falsely blame us for not paying the corresponding amount to the lawyers.”