Students of a public school. Monica Torres
The Constitutional Court has issued a ruling denying Vox permission to go to schools in the Balearic Islands to check if they indoctrinate students and make it difficult or impossible to use the Spanish language during school hours. The ruling rejects the appeal filed by that political formation before the decision of the Bureau of the Parliament of the Balearic Islands not to authorize its representatives to access the public educational centers of this autonomous community during class hours, as was their claim. Vox has three seats in a 59-year-old House.
At first, the Balearic Government decided to allow Vox to visit the educational centers of the public network during non-school hours, so as "not to interfere with the normal operation" of the schools. Once the petition was taken to the governing bodies of the regional Parliament, the Bureau of the chamber also did not agree that the control work intended by said party could take place while the students were developing the usual teaching tasks. Vox then decided to go in amparo before the Constitutional, arguing that the refusal received was a violation of article 23.2 of the Constitution, relating to the right of political representation and specifically the "right to access in conditions of equality to public functions and positions, with the requirements indicated by the laws".
The judgment – of which the magistrate María Luisa Segoviano, of the progressive sector has been rapporteur – reasons that the visit of regional deputies to the public educational centers of the Balearic Islands constitutes an instrument provided for in art. 15.5 of the regulation of the Balearic Parliament for the control of government action that is part of the status of the position of deputy, protected in turn by the aforementioned article 23.2 of the Constitution. But at the same time it emphasizes that in this case the condition that the visit takes place outside school hours "responds to parameters of rationality and proportionality", since it was based on a cause established by regulation, such as not altering the normal functioning of school activity.
The conflict between Vox and the Balearic Government has been going on for more than four years. The Department of Education decided that the deputies of this training could visit the centers outside school hours and in the company of the educational inspector of the area, a proposal that was not accepted by the aforementioned parliamentary group. In January 2020, the Ministry of Education explained that the proposal sought to guarantee, on the one hand, "the right of regional deputies to access public offices" and on the other allowed students "to exercise their right in education free of any external pressure".
The Constitutional Court decided to admit the petition for amparo in 2021, and the appeal was addressed to the plenary, given its possible constitutional relevance. Now, the sentence finally issued highlights that "after repeated requests" for Vox to specify the purpose of the visits it wanted to carry out, said training "did not do it, preventing with that action that a more concrete weighting could be made to determine the need for the visit to take place during school hours. " In any case, in 2019 the spokesman for Vox, Jorge Campos, said that the purpose of the proposed visits was to check the state of the infrastructures and "what happens with the imposition of Catalan", and with "the indoctrination that is carried out with linguistic immersion in Catalan", to add that "we must respond to the thousands of complaints that have been received for years".
The ruling has had the vote against the magistrate Enrique Arnaldo, who will make a particular vote to which the also magistrates Ricardo Enríquez, Concepción Espejel and César Tolosa have adhered, all of them from the conservative sector of the court. The discrepancy is based on the fact that in his opinion the amparo application should have prospered, declaring "the violation of the right of the Vox-Actua Baleares Parliamentary Group of the Parliament of the Balearic Islands to the exercise of parliamentary public office with the requirements indicated by the laws and without illegitimate disturbances", in accordance with the aforementioned article 23.2 of the Constitution.
In the opinion of the members of the conservative block of the Constitutional, the agreements of the Bureau of the Balearic Parliament "violated the ius in officium (the competences) of the position of parliamentarian", because they came to prevent the deputies of the appellant group from exercising the function of control of the Balearic government, "by accepting the apodictic refusal of this to allow those deputies to make the visit during school hours to public educational centers of the Balearic Islands, a visit they had requested under the right of access to public offices provided for in art. 15.5 of the Regulation of the Parliament of the Balearic Islands".
The dissenting magistrates understand that "this norm integrates the statute of the office of deputy, so it is thus part of the essential core of the fundamental right to the exercise of parliamentary public office with the requirements indicated by the laws and without conditioning or illegitimate disturbances". The individual vote considers that the Bureau of the Balearic Parliament did not exercise its powers "in defense of the right of parliamentarians, that is, it did not ensure its effectiveness, but limited itself to accepting the unfounded limitation on the right of visits imposed by the Balearic Executive, shielding itself in a restrictive interpretation "of the regulation of the chamber, in terms that left said right empty of content.
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