Judge Enrique Arnaldo (in the center) takes office as the new judge of the Constitutional Court before the body's outgoing president, Juan José González Rivas, in November 2018 in Madrid. ZIPI (EFE)
The Constitutional Court has rejected the ten appeals and the requests for clarification filed against its decision last December to flatly reject the challenges formulated by the leaders of the
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against magistrates Enrique Arnaldo and Concepción Espejel, both appointed at the proposal of the popular parliamentary group in Congress. In these resources, the impartiality of the aforementioned members of the court was questioned due to their affinity with the PP. If the challenges had been successful, the court of guarantees would have been left without a quorum to resolve the last pending appeals against the sentence that the Supreme Court imposed on the independence leaders for the crime of sedition.
In the order issued this Tuesday to definitively reject the challenges, the court defends the ideological plurality that exists among the magistrates.
In this sense, he recalls that the necessary variety of legal perspectives that converge in his deliberations and decisions, in close correspondence with political pluralism, "becomes a sign of his own identity, and not a negative conditioning that affects his impartiality ”.
The resolution also emphasizes that the irreplaceable nature of the magistrates that make up the court —since they cannot be replaced by others— "must lead to the fact that its composition must be preserved against attempts to paralyze the functioning of the constitutional jurisdiction."
The court considers that the challenges presented have been formulated in a generic way, by means of identical writings, without arguing the connection of the causes of challenge invoked with the object of the process, and without these having a place in those causes.
Faced with the insistence of the appellants that the causes of recusal invoked concur, the order refers to the reasons set forth in the aforementioned order of last December, as they are not distorted by the arguments contained in the appeals.