The president of the Constitutional Court, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, stressed this Tuesday that the court cannot become "a third [legislative] Chamber", a possibility that has caused concern in a sector of the guarantee body in this legislature due to the accumulation of appeals from opposition parties against laws passed by Parliament.
This situation even gave rise to an unusual episode last December, when the Constitutional Court paralyzed, after an appeal by the PP, the parliamentary processing of two amendments on the renewal of the court itself that the Government was trying to introduce as a matter of urgency in an alien legal reform. to that matter.
The appeal that the Constitutional Court is not a third legislative chamber and therefore cannot be used by the parties in this sense has already been made in the past by other presidents of the court.
Among them, Conde-Pumpido's predecessor, Pedro González-Trevijano, when he took leave of office just a month ago.
The same request was also made, long before, by the person who presided over the Constitutional Court between 1986 and 1992, Francisco Tomás y Valiente, assassinated by ETA in 1996 and to whom the court honored this Tuesday on the 27th anniversary of the crime.
Conde-Pumpido actually quoted Tomás y Valiente to recall that he was the one who launched that idea: “That this Court can never be a third Chamber,
In his speech, the current president of the Constitutional Court recalled in this regard an essay by Tomás y Valiente in which, confirming the strength of the Fundamental Law, he said that its "resistance (...) can be understood as adaptability to political dynamics, allowing and channeling the various political options to reach the power or powers of the State and convert the different pragmatic expectations offered to citizens into State law”.
He also attributed Tomás y Valiente to the Constitution the “capacity to be interpreted in a flexible and up to a certain point changing way depending on new problems and new sensibilities”.
For Conde-Pumpido, that is the wide margin that the constitutional text grants to political forces.
Thus, he has referred to Tomás y Valiente as a staunch defender "of the constitutional order that emerged in 1978, which has brought about the greatest period of prosperity, freedom and harmony in the history of Spain."
But at the same time with an evolutionary conception of the Fundamental Law, given that, as the honoree wrote in his
Intellectual Autobiography
, the truth "is a cumulative process of truths", and that implies that one must learn "with modesty and relativity not to pursue a unique and total Truth (sic), but partial truths, perhaps transitory or fleeting, perhaps contradictory, but not for that reason infertile”.
Sources from the Constitutional Court interpret Conde-Pumpido's speech in terms of current affairs: the court is, for example, these days in a process of adapting its own doctrine on the right to abortion, with arguments different from those used in 1985 to open the first door to the decriminalization of the voluntary interruption of pregnancy.
And in a context, on the other hand, in which 65 challenges against four magistrates have accumulated.
A single party, Vox, has filed 46 unconstitutionality appeals in this legislature, each of which has sought the total or partial annulment of laws or decree-laws approved by Parliament.
Two of the children of Tomás and Valiente, Francisco and Ana, as well as the president of the Council of State, Magdalena Valerio, attended the tribute act;
the interim president of the General Council of the Judiciary, Rafael Mozo;
the rector of the Autonomous University ―where the professor was shot on February 14, 1996―, Amaia Mendikoetxea;
together with former presidents of the court and current magistrates.
Finally, Conde-Pumpido placed before the monolith with which the court honors the memory of Tomás y Valiente a bouquet of 27 red roses, one for each year that has elapsed since his murder.
Then there was a minute of silence.
