Three million unenforced judgments: the CGPJ activates a shock plan for the most congested labour courts

Spain has close to three million judicial decisions awaiting enforcement, a figure published by Cinco Dias that puts numbers to the bottleneck every litigation lawyer knows first-hand: winning the case is no longer the hardest part; collecting is. Against this backdrop, the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) has agreed to start the proceedings to launch a shock plan in the labour courts with the greatest backlog or delay in setting hearings.

The plan: reinforcement where the queue is longest

The mechanism chosen is the reinforcement of judicial bodies provided for in article 216 bis of the Judiciary Act (LOPJ), developed by Royal Decree 559/2026. The plan foresees 50 reinforcement posts distributed among the most congested labour jurisdictions, with a 15-day window for the affected bodies to make representations and a commitment to have the posts staffed before 1 June 2027.

The choice of the labour jurisdiction is no coincidence. It concentrates some of the country's longest delays in setting hearings, and its caseload mixes dismissals, quantity claims and fundamental rights proceedings with direct impact on people and companies. The reinforcements are conceived as temporary support attached to the body in difficulty, an instrument already tested in other jurisdictions with uneven results that the council now wants to apply with verifiable tracking criteria.

The execution problem behind the figure

The three million unenforced decisions deserve their own paragraph, because they are the symptom of a structural failure. An unenforced judgment is a client who won and does not collect, an insolvency file that does not move, an eviction that does not execute. For firms, the figure translates into management work that is neither billed nor valued as it should be: tracking files, pressing for enforcement orders, managing asset reports and explaining to the client why the system is slow.

At the structural level, the underlying debate remains open: shock plans move existing resources towards bottlenecks, but the figure of three million pending enforcements points to a problem of means and design that temporary reinforcements only relieve. The effective creation of the RD 559/2026 posts and their staffing before June 2027 will be the serious indicator of whether the system corrects or merely redistributes.

For claimant firms, the accumulation has a direct cost in the client relationship: explaining that a won judgment may take years to be collected has become a regular part of the engagement letter.

We will follow the plan's roll-out and its effects by territory in our firm processes section and the institutional news in news. Firms reviewing their own intake discipline can also revisit our case-opening checklist.

The CGPJ's agreement opens now an administrative phase in which the affected judicial bodies and the autonomous communities with transferred competences will have their say on the concrete distribution of the 50 posts. The council's own press release acknowledges that the measure is one more piece of a broader response, and that the global backlog figures will only bend if the reinforcements are accompanied by digitalisation and procedural management measures. The sector's memory is prudent: previous reinforcement plans improved punctual statistics without eliminating the structural queue, and the follow-up of this one will have to be judged by data published territory by territory, not by announcements.

Source: CGPJ press release and Cinco Dias. This piece is informative and does not constitute legal advice.