Ariel Lijo's move: he will not resign as a judge but will request leave until November 30

Ariel Lijo, who will be appointed by decree as a member of the Court by President Javier Lijo , "will not resign" as a federal judge but will request leave until November 30 of this year in the hope that the Senate will give him two-thirds of the votes to be appointed in accordance with the National Constitution.

"It is a promotion within the same power and he has the right to ask for leave," a source close to the current federal investigating judge explained to Clarín .

Fearing that he will not get the necessary votes in the Senate - last week the session to vote on it failed - Lijo thus ensures the possibility of returning to being an investigating judge in case the political-judicial strategy of Milei and his star advisor Santiago Caputo fails.

To do so, "he will have to request leave based on two Court decisions, number 12/2004 and 34/77, which establish the leave regime," explained a judicial source.

Furthermore, it must be based on government decree 3413/79 and, as it is more than 90 days, it must also have the approval of the National Council of the Judiciary, the sources explain. Such precautions are due to the fact that it is an unprecedented judicial situation.

In any case, the final say in this administrative process is up to the Court, which decides these types of things collegially, that is, with the intervention of Horacio Rosatti, Carlos Rosenkrantz and Ricardo Lorenzetti. The highest court ends up approving even "judges' licenses to participate in a seminar," recalled another source.

And for that “definition of superintendence,” as logistical issues are called in courts, the Court is waiting to read the decree that Milei will sign for the appointments.

Lijo has the “sponsorship” of Judge Lorenzetti but has not managed to obtain the two-thirds vote of the Senate for his approval for 11 months.

Lorenzetti's strategy is to try to regain the presidency of the Court with the support of Lijo and eventually that of García-Mansilla, current dean of the Faculty of Law at the Austral University.

Although last September, Rosatti was re-elected with the vote of Rosenkrantz and Maqueda to head the highest court for a new three-year term , that is, until 2027. Lorenzetti was president for 11 years until 2018.

"All the problems begin when Lorenzetti loses the presidency of the Court and there I see an excessive ambition, and he has done everything possible to return," Maqueda declared in recent weeks and after his retirement by making the fight public.

This situation has precedents. As the lawyer and member of the Pensar Foundation Martín Casares wrote, the proposed appointment of former President Mauricio Macri by decree of Rosatti and Rosenkrantz in 2015 provoked great rejection in politics, the judiciary and academia.

But at that point, President Macri acknowledged the error, backtracked and sent the documents to the Senate, where he sought consensus and his candidates were finally approved. Lijo and García-Mansilla now run the same risk of generating a huge controversy.

In addition, the three-member Court, in a collegiate manner, must also decide whether to swear in Lijo and García-Mansilla, and the quality of Milei's decree, which will be announced in the next few hours, will weigh in on that decision. "Don't forget that in Justice, the way decisions are made is very important," said another judicial source.

In the Comodoro Py courts, it was recalled with irony that Milei made this controversial decision on the birthday of former President Néstor Kirchner, the author of decree 222/2003 that created a transparency mechanism for appointing the judges of the Court.