Baltasar Garzón Real (Torres, Jaén, October 26, 1955) is a Spanish jurist. He was a judge since 1981 and a magistrate of the Central Court of Instruction No. 5 of the National Court from 1988 to 2012 - except between May 1993 and May 1994. He was in charge of investigating some of the most relevant crimes that occurred in Spain during that time: crimes against humanity, terrorism, state terrorism, drug trafficking, political corruption and economic crime.

He presented himself as an independent candidate for deputy on the PSOE lists in 1993 and, when the executive was formed, he was named Government delegate in the National Plan on Drugs, with the rank of Secretary of State.6​7​ In May 1994 he abandoned both charges.​

On February 22, 2012, he was expelled from the judicial career after being sentenced by the Supreme Court to eleven years of disqualification for a crime of prevarication committed during the investigation of the Gürtel case.