Tribunal of what?

The word "tribunal" existed in Latin, where it designated a raised platform, upon which magistrates sat on curule chairs - a sort of portable folding seat of military origin, prerogative of kings in pre-republican times. These men wore purple-edged togas, also of kingly and military origin. They didn't sit raised above you for nothing, and woe betide you if you got on the wrong side of them.

Today we still have many of these symbols. The judge's robe, for example, is still referred to in Spanish as a "toga." The term "tribunal" - the ordinary word in Spanish for a court of law - is associated with many other occasions of public solemnity. Where the English language might prefer such words as panel, jury, board or commission, in Spain we have "tribunals" that emit collective value judgments in academic and civil service exams, and on many other occasions, right down to beauty contests and dog shows. As such, the word tribunal, loaded with all its majesty, has been cheapened, or shifted to more diffuse semantic terrain.

In Spain we have the Court of Auditors (Tribunal de Cuentas), and we used to have a Tribunal for the Defense of Competition, now called a Commission and attached to the Economy Ministry. In none of these cases does the term have the binding force of a court of law. Long ago, the Spanish Royal Academy's dictionary perceived a certain imposture in the term Tribunal de Cuentas, defining it in 1869 as an "office" charged with the scrutiny of public accounts.

The Court of Auditors has no judicial police at its service. It is perfunctory, a rubber stamp

The Tribunal de Cuentas now, in theory, performs two functions: one jurisdictional, the other of monitoring. In the first it acts against the misuse of public funds, and behaves like a real court: it holds sessions and demands economic liabilities, and in this case the "councilors" wear their judicial robes. But in the second it examines the accounts of the state, of public companies and of political parties, in each case according to the documents these bodies - the interested parties - facilitate themselves. In this latter function (the best known) there are no robes, no bench, no witnesses, no investigation, no cross-examination, no sanctions, no indemnities, no convictions and no sentences. This "court" has no teeth: it cannot order a search, verify a signature, or open a safe full of undeclared funds. It has no judicial police at its service. It is perfunctory, a rubber stamp.

The councilors are appointed by the political parties, on a quota basis. Some are civil servants and auditors; others former members of the Congress and the Senate, known for their unswerving loyalty to their party. When the latter grow too old for the rigors of parliamentary attendance, they are "kicked upstairs" to a sinecure on the Court of Auditors.

This is not intended to discredit the work of the councilors, who in general prepare their reports neatly and legibly, noting apparent deviations, irregularities, mismanagement and leaks that no one else seems to have noticed.

But the reader should be aware that certain politicians, when accused of actions of doubtful legality, have lately been pleased to proclaim themselves absolved of wrongdoing by the "Court of Auditors" - perhaps confiding that the citizen and voter will interpret this as meaning a real court. They omit to add that this court acts only upon information that is submitted to it by the interested party, the truth or falsity of which the court has no means of discovering. At most, it can observe that funds have been diverted to other purposes than the ones formally ascribed to it (but not the amounts involved), and propose sensible, professional critiques.

Thus when a politician, in reference to some fund-siphoning racket, says "this has been endorsed by the Court of Auditors," it does mean something. But the endorsement is administrative, not judicial - a perfunctory rubber stamp, which comforts voters to whom the word "tribunal" means a place where serious business is enacted.