In the coming weeks, the PSOE will seek the necessary support to achieve the inauguration of Pedro Sánchez and the parties that hold the key to the success of this inauguration, with 24 votes, are all pro-independence: PNV, EH Bildu, ERC and Junts per Catalonia. The negotiation process is already beginning. The demands of the Catalan secessionist parties – the right to self-determination and amnesty for those accused of the trial – have now been added to the proposal to reform the territorial model proposed by Lehendakari Iñigo Urkullu PNV. His plan is to propose to the state a pact to “reinterpret” the constitution without having to reform it, so that Spain advances towards a “plurinational” state in which the “historical communities” have “agreed decision-making capacity”, a euphemism for the right to self-determination. The Socialists consider the Lehendakari’s proposal to be legitimate and are ready to discuss it, but emphasize that they do not share it and that the limits of negotiations are set in the Constitution.
The Constitutional Court, through a dozen rulings over the last 15 years, has defined the limits that the Basic Law sets in relation to that old demand of nationalists in both the Basque Country and Catalonia: self-sovereignty.
The Constitution recognizes only one holder of sovereignty: the entire Spanish people. And the Constitutional Court has relied on this maxim to overturn successive decisions by the Basque and Catalan governments aimed at promoting independence processes in their territories. In 2008, the Constitutional Court Lehendakari prevented Juan José Ibarretxe from convening a sovereignty consultation in the Basque Country; In 2014, it annulled the parliament’s resolution that declared Catalonia a “sovereign political and legal subject” in 2013; In 2015, it canceled the November 9, 2014 consultation (although it had taken place). And in December of the same year, 2015, it also annulled the decision with which Parliament had given the green light to break with the rest of Spain a month earlier. These verdicts were followed by a flood of resolutions intended to halt the final stage of the trial. The court’s conclusions have always been two: that a part of Spain cannot decide for the whole; and that the collective rules of the game can be changed – through constitutional reform – but cannot be ignored.
In 2017, in the ruling annulling the parliamentary referendum law, the Constitutional Court declared: “For none of the peoples of Spain there is a right to self-determination, understood as the right to promote and carry out their unilateral secession from the Spanish State , where they are based. Spain. According to all evidence, such a right is not recognized in the Constitution.” The ruling cited a dozen previous rulings issued since 2008. These are his main arguments:
A consultation is only possible with the participation of “the entire Spanish electoral body”. “Therefore, a referendum was called without obtaining the necessary permission from the state,” the court noted. In addition, however, he stressed that “this specific type of consultation is not provided for in the Constitution nor in the Organic Law referred to in Article 92.3 of the Constitution”. “Furthermore, it must be added with much greater importance that the consultation on the “self-determination” of Catalonia would have to fully affect the aforementioned identity and unity of the subject holding sovereignty, in accordance with our jurisprudence “It could not be the subject of a referendum other than that provided for in Article 168.3 of the Constitution, with the participation of the entire Spanish electoral body.”
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A law against constitutional principles. “The law of self-determination referendum is unconstitutional according to all the evidence and it is unconstitutional as a whole because it expressly contradicts the essential principles of our constitutional order: the national sovereignty anchored in the Spanish people, the unity of the nation itself” in a social and democratic The rule of law and the primacy of the constitution itself.”
The Catalan people are not holders of sovereign power. “The Catalan people are not the holders of a sovereign power that excludes the Spanish nation constituted as a state, nor can they therefore be identified as a legal subject competing with the holder of national sovereignty; Nor should the citizens of Catalonia be confused with the sovereign people, which is conceived as the ideal unit of constitutive power and as such a source of constitution and regulation.
The Spaniards are the only ones who can be used to make the decision. “The binding self-determination referendum, Law 19/2017 [la del referéndum de independencia] “It is as consistent with the unconstitutional premise of the sovereignty of the Catalan people on which it is based as it is incompatible with the unity of the Spanish nation on which the constitution is based,” the ruling continues. “Even if the vote had not meant the independence of Catalonia, this unity of the nation and the state in which it is located would have already been irrevocably abolished. The nation on whose unity the Constitution is based is that of all Spaniards as free and equal citizens. They are the only ones who could hypothetically be called upon to decide on the durability and fate of the common State (Article 168 of the Constitution), without the constituent power of which they are the sole holders continuing to be worthy of that name in this case such a decision can only be attributed to a fraction of the Spanish people.
What concerns everyone, everyone has to decide for themselves. “What concerns everyone, that is, whether the common state in which Spain was founded remains or not, can, if necessary, be reconsidered and decided by everyone; “The opposite would result in the legal and constitutional bankruptcy of the nation of all, with the collapse of the unity of citizenship.”
An autonomous parliament outside the law. “With Law 19/2017, the Catalan Parliament has attempted to de facto abolish the validity of the Constitution, the Statute of Autonomy and all non-agreed legal norms on the territory of Catalonia and for the entire Catalan people. or comply with the dictates of their mere will. It means nothing more than the apodictic confirmation both of his status as representative of a “sovereignty” that does not exist in law and of the hierarchical supremacy of rules dictated without any basis other than his discretion. By taking this action, the Chamber has found itself completely outside the law, has de facto embarked on an unacceptable path, has avowedly failed to act in the exercise of its own constitutional and statutory duties and has assumed the maximum level of risk for all citizens of Catalonia, the validity and effectiveness of all the guarantees and rights granted to them both by the Constitution and by the Statute itself.”
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