First Vice President of the Senate Cristina Narbona and President of the Senate Ander Gil last December 20 in Madrid. Gustavo Valiente (Europa Press)
The Constitutional Court has begun to reconsider its recent doctrine on the possibility of interference in the work of Parliament. In its second sentence on the education law, known as the Celáa law, passed in plenary session this week, the court approved the parliamentary process that the education reform followed, a point the PP had challenged on the grounds that the factional government Allies were involved in “an improper exercise of the right to amend”.
This is a similar case to last December, when the court barred the vote on two amendments tabled by the PSOE and Podemos in the debate on reforming the penal code. In the decision rejecting the PP’s appeal against the Celáa law by seven votes to four, the Guarantor Authority is now introducing different considerations than those put forward by the Constitutional Court itself last December, when it had a conservative majority were made to stop the regular processing of parliamentary law which quelled rebellion and reduced embezzlement.
In the latter case, the court considered that the introduction of two amendments to the criminal code reform bill aimed at speeding up the renewal of the constitution itself, which had been blocked for six months, was potentially damaging to the rights of PP MPs. A precautionary measure was requested on appeal to prevent the amendments from being voted on, and the court agreed to prohibit debate on such texts. The PP’s thesis was that if they were allowed to be debated in the chambers, their parliamentarians would be deprived of the opportunity to oppose the changes that were to be introduced in an originally proposed initiative to amend the criminal code. not to facilitate the declassification of the Constitution
Now, however, when deciding on the PP’s appeal against the Celáa law, the court – currently with a progressive majority – has rejected the thesis that there had been “an abusive exercise of the right to change” in the debate on education reform. The people’s criticism was based on this point, that some of the reforms to the Education Act “were introduced by amendments proposed by parliamentary factions supporting the government”. The appeal also stated that such groups intended to “change material aspects of the law, although the changes should be of a minor or incidental nature.”
This argument was also used to intervene in Parliament’s work last December, demanding that the debate on the above-mentioned amendments to the penal code reform be prevented. However, the Court has now changed its view of Parliament’s autonomy, now emphasizing that the right to amend “integrates the core of parliamentary representative function” and is “entitled to all MEPs and political groups without distinction and with identical content”. to be able to deduce a limitation of the changes due to their greater or lesser importance.”
Judge Laura Díez was the rapporteur on the judgment, which dismisses all of the grounds put forward by the PP for its appeal and considers that qualifying “own” for the co-official language of some autonomous communities does not constitute a violation of any constitutional principle. The judgment assumes that the law uses the terms “co-official” and “properly” in an “interchangeable” way and that, unlike Spanish, it does so in the sense of “peculiar, characteristic or exclusive to an autonomous community”, that it is the common language of all”.
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