The Supreme Court has handed down a sentence in which it annuls one of the reasons that allow the exclusion of an opponent who aspires to enter the National Police: wearing intraocular or phakic lenses. The litigation chamber, as elDiario.es has learned, has resolved the merits of the matter after temporarily annulling the ban in 2021 and reproaches the Interior for having left applicants out of the Police for having undergone this type of surgery when, For example, in the United States, even members of the Army are allowed. The judges even find the procedural behavior of the Interior and the State Advocacy throughout the process “unserious” as they have copied and pasted into their reports conclusions taken from a web page “whose foundation and credibility is not proven” .
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The sentence, to which this newspaper has had access, agrees with several dozen aspirants to the National Police who went to court represented by the Legal Oppositions office and denounced that they had been left out of the opposition for wearing intraocular or phakic lenses. . The appeal came in 2021 and the judges’ first decision came in September of that year, when the magistrates suspended this prohibition in a precautionary manner. Since then, the same room has come to cancel a call for 2,500 police positions for incurring in this exclusion, although it was later started again when verifying that the Interior had corrected the situation.
The lawsuit went ahead to examine the merits of the matter and the Supreme Court judges have concluded that the 2021 regulations that introduced intraocular or phakic lenses as a cause for exclusion is illegal because it does not have any type of scientific or medical justification. A decision made after studying the reports provided by the parties: a report from a private clinic specializing in these surgeries by the appellants, and a report from a website by the Interior and the State Attorney’s Office.
The judges recognize that the expert opinion of the private clinic comes from a professional with interests in the sector, but they also value her “undeniably respectable professional curriculum” and that her expert opinion “is clearly exposed and reasoned, with precise indication of all the sources of knowledge employed. Its conclusions also coincide with those of another “prestigious” ophthalmological institute, they highlight.
Among other data, the magistrates emphasize that in the United States soldiers can be part of a military unit even if they have this type of glasses. “And if the US military who, if necessary, must go into combat, can wear phakic lenses, it is not possible to understand why a different criterion should apply to members of the National Police; especially considering that the danger to which a police officer is exposed is not greater than that of a soldier”, says the Supreme Court.
Faced with this and other arguments, the judges reproach the Interior and the State Attorney for their “not serious” behavior for providing their opinion at the last minute and in the form of a report from the official responsible for health in the General Directorate of the Police that is taken entirely from a web page: “It turns out to be a reproduction of a text that appeared on a private web page, whose foundation and credibility is not proven,” reproaches the Supreme Court. The Police even tried to pass off that copied content as their own report, “passing off as their own something that their services had not prepared. And already in court, the State Attorney has not done anything to try to explain it either, ”he adds.
The Supreme Court’s conclusion is clear: “There is currently no solid medical reason why those who have phakic lenses implanted are in significantly worse conditions than other people for the development of activities typical of members of the National Police.” He adds that the 2021 standard came into force to replace another from 1995 in which there was no prohibition on this type of lens. “Establishing a new cause of exclusion affects the right of access to a public function, such as the police, and for this reason a new restriction cannot legitimately be introduced without good reasons to justify it.”
The result is that the royal decree of 2021 that includes these reasons for medical exclusion related to vision may no longer include “intraocular foreign bodies”, “any type of intraocular surgery” as well as the subsection that points to “refractive correction techniques: this section should be considered in depending on the result of the corneal refractive surgery, and having performed the surgery at least 60 days before the examination. Phakic lenses will not be accepted. They do maintain as a reason for exclusion the “loss or atrophy of an eyeball” because the judges understand that this may be due to more factors than an intraocular operation even though it appears in the same section.
