The president of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo (in the background, in the center), and the general secretary of the Popular Party, Cuca Gamarra (on the right) during the closure of the parliamentary session 'Guarantees of the Rule of Law', in the Congress of Deputies, this Monday. Fernando Sánchez (Europa Press)
The PP organized this Monday a conference under the title "Guarantees of the Rule of Law" in the Congress of Deputies which, led by jurists from the parliamentary and constitutional branches, became an act of denunciation of the deterioration of the system, due to the abusive practices of successive governments, especially reiterated in the present legislature.
The former magistrate of the Constitutional Court Manuel Aragón directed the first part, and sounded the alarm about the "institutional deterioration" that is registered in multiple countries, even in some of "old democracy."
The closing ceremony was presided over by the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who synthesized the meaning of the jurists' complaints as a sign of the capacity for social reaction, because everywhere "citizens stand up to motley autocrats".
Feijóo declared himself a "grateful student" of the jurists Manuel Aragón, Encarnación Roca, Ramón Rodríguez Arribas, Benigno Pendás or Luis María Cazorla, specialists in the aforementioned subjects, who followed one another in criticizing the loss of democratic quality of the constitutional system due to of the abuses of power, not only of the Executive, but of the parliamentary majorities.
The recent clash between Congress and the Constitutional Court, regarding the very precautionary measure requested by the PP and agreed by the court to stop the legislative process of the reform of the Penal Code regarding the suppression of the crime of sedition and the downward modification of embezzlement.
But they all avoided turning the episode into the axis of his intervention.
Feijóo, in turn, combined the legal with the political,
Aragon, in turn, advocated for a justice that is not political, which should not be done either —he said— in the Constitutional Law, which has a path regulated by law, because it has “rules of interpretation” that must always be legal.
Other interventions showed some underlying concern about the recent renewal of the guarantee body.
Thus, the former vice president of the Constitutional Ramón Rodríguez Arribas stated that he had remained “very calm, well, calm” —he said— when he heard the new president of the court say that the Constitution does not allow secession, self-determination, or independence.
Encarna Roca, in turn, recalled the well-known phrase of the first president of the Constitutional Court, Manuel García Pelayo, when he stated that the guarantee court "is a political court", but that it "acts with legal rules".
And he resorted to another quote in the sense that it must be guaranteed that "the Executive does not possess the legislature", to explain with this that "this statement was the one that decided me to support the sentence on the state of alarm", a ruling that meant the annulment of the decrees approved by the Government to deal with the health emergency due to the covid-19 pandemic.
Benigno Pendás, president of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, in turn stressed that "caring for Parliament is caring for democracy" and warned that since a first resolution dating from 1985 the guarantee court made it clear that a “alteration of the will of the chamber” due to defects in the legislative process can lead to the declaration of the unconstitutionality of the procedure followed.