The Constitutional Court closes the way to any attempt to create a "Catalan digital republic"

Carles Puigdemont, in a Twitter image of April 6, 2021, in which he shows a card of the so-called "Republican Digital Identity".

The Constitutional Court has closed in its plenary session this week one of the most controversial chapters of the procés and the illegal referendum of 1-O, by issuing a sentence that leaves in the hands of the State sufficient control mechanisms that would prevent eventual attempts to launch a Catalan "digital republic", or any other autonomous community. The ruling dismisses an appeal of unconstitutionality filed by the Parliament of Catalonia against several precepts of a royal decree approved by the Government in 2019 after the experiences of two years earlier, with the implementation of the projects of disconnection of Catalonia with respect to the rest of Spain.

The Executive issued this regulation based on the need to adopt urgent measures "for reasons of public security in matters of digital administration, public sector contracting and telecommunications." What the Government intended was to prevent the Catalan administration from having means that would make it possible to exercise from outside Spain a supposed right to vote in consultations or referendums convened unilaterally. Or that for initiatives of this type there were documents such as the Catalan DNI.

The decree law in question left the door open for the state administration to fully assume the management of electronic communications services, always exceptionally and temporarily. The requirement for this type of action was to prove that it was a question of dealing with situations that put collective security and public order, or national security itself, at risk. Before this there have already been two rulings of the Constitutional Court with pronouncements favorable to the competences of the State in this matter, in response to appeals from the Generalitat and the Basque Government.

The judgment – of which the magistrate Laura Díez has been rapporteur – dismisses the appeal of the Catalan Parliament because it considers that there was indeed "the extraordinary and urgent need required to approve a royal decree-law and that the temporary prohibition of the use of identification systems based on distributed registry technologies does not exceed the limits of the state competence recognized in article 149.1.18 of the Constitution". This provision confers on the State, among others, exclusive competence over "the bases of the legal regime of public administrations" and "the system of responsibility of all public administrations".

The ruling also considers that there has been a partial loss of the object of the appeal in relation to some of the alleged violations of competence and also in relation to some infringements raised by the Parliament of Catalonia. This loss of purpose is due to the subsequent approval of the General Communications Law, which introduced changes in the legislation, among other matters on the prior authorization of the general administration of the State in relation to electronic signatures and seals that the autonomous community uses for its relationship with citizens.

The Constitutional Court considers that the provision establishing the intervention on all electronic communications networks and services for reasons of public policy has also lost its purpose. Finally, the judgment addresses the possible violations of European law contained in the aforementioned decree-law. In this regard, the court maintains that the community order "is not in itself a direct canon of constitutionality", so that "the tacks based on the alleged incompatibility with it are not addressable" in an appeal that questions the constitutional fit of state legislation.

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