The Government has opted for a fundamental ideological clash with Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the president of the Community of Madrid, in an atmosphere already of electoral campaign: the Council of Ministers has paralyzed this Tuesday, with an appeal of suspensive character before the Constitutional Court, a rule of the Madrid Executive that, according to the interpretation of La Moncloa, It complicates the enforcement of the euthanasia law that came into force in June 2021. The Government understands that Díaz Ayuso, who has always demonstrated against the right to euthanasia, thus approaching the most conservative Catholic sectors, has exceeded his powers by trying to stop a state law with an autonomous norm. The appeal to the Constitutional Court automatically suspends the challenged norm for at least five months, in accordance with article 161 of the Constitution.
The contested rule is the second additional provision of the Law of the Community of Madrid 1/2023, creating the Madrid Agency for the Support of Adults with Disabilities, approved on February 15. The appeal arrives at the gates of the campaign and after another strong clash between the two governments on account of the veto imposed by Ayuso on the presence of Minister Felix Bolaños in the box of the military parade during the regional party of Dos de Mayo.
But this time it is not a question of protocol but very deep: the Government of Pedro Sánchez understands that Madrid wants to torpedo the law by adding in this community the requirement to have, to request euthanasia, with a judicial authorization that the state norm does not provide, and thus complicating the exercise of this right sanctioned by the majority of Congress. The Executive thus launches a political warning: there will not be an attempt to prevent the application of laws such as euthanasia or abortion. In the background there is an ideological battle in which the PSOE defends its progressive rights laws – gay marriage, abortion, euthanasia – against the PP.
With the law of homosexual marriage the PP failed in the Constitutional, which endorsed it in 2012, and the abortion law also failed to annul it because the court parked the appeal for more than a decade – just this Tuesday, the new progressive majority of the Constitutional has given the green light to that norm. The PSOE and Unidas Podemos are confident that the same will happen with the euthanasia law, also appealed by the conservatives. The Constitutional Court will have a progressive majority for the next nine years.
The text that the Government challenges of this additional provision of the Community of Madrid is as follows: "In any case, when it is intended to carry out any action that affects the right to life of the person with disabilities who has been provided with representative support for the exercise of legal capacity or is expressly determined in the resolution that established the support, A procedure of voluntary jurisdiction will be conducted for the application for judicial authorization." That is where the Government understands that Madrid is placing an added judicial authorization without having the competence to do so.
The appeal presented by the Executive maintains that this autonomic norm "affects two matters whose competence is state: procedural legislation and civil legislation", because it regulates "the cases in which judicial authorization must be obtained from whoever holds the representative function of the person with disabilities". This, according to the legal services of La Moncloa, violates article 149.1.6 of the Constitution and involves interference in the Organic Law of the Judiciary, the Civil Procedure and the Voluntary Jurisdiction. "In this sense, the aforementioned requirement of judicial authorization in the context of a procedure of voluntary jurisdiction implies that said autonomous law, on the one hand, extends judicial intervention to cases not provided for in state legislation and, on the other hand, constitutes a procedural rule in that it institutes a procedure of voluntary jurisdiction for that purpose", says the text of the Government, which will now have to study the Constitutional.