The president of the constitutional court, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, emphasized this Tuesday that the guarantee system could not become a “third chamber”. [legislativa]’, a possibility that has raised concern in a sector of judges this legislature due to the accumulation of resources by opposition parties against legislation passed by Parliament. This situation even led to an unusual episode last December when, following an appeal by the PP, the Constitutional Court itself paralyzed parliamentary processing of two amendments to the Court’s renewal, which the government was urgently trying to introduce in a foreign legal reform.
The indication that the Constitutional Court is not a third legislative chamber and therefore cannot be used by parties to review laws of Parliament has already been made by other Presidents of the Court in the past. Among them was Conde-Pumpido’s predecessor, Pedro González-Trevijano, when he left office almost a month ago. The same request was made long before by Francisco Tomás y Valiente, who presided over the Constitutional Court between 1986 and 1992, who was assassinated by ETA in 1996 and whom the court honored on the 27th anniversary of the crime this Tuesday. Conde-Pumpido quoted Tomás y Valiente as reminding that he was the one who originated this idea: “That this court can never be a third chamber, that the constitution allows for a wide range of political options in it and that the peacefully alternating different options Power of the state is the basis of every democracy”.
More information
In his speech, the current President of the Constitutional Court recalled an essay by Tomás y Valiente in which, reviewing the strength of the Basic Law, he said that its “resistance (…) can be understood as the ability to adapt to political dynamics, to allow and to channel that the different policy options can reach the power or authority of the state and transform into state law the different pragmatic expectations offered to the citizens”. Tomás y Valiente also wrote of the Constitution’s “ability to be interpreted flexibly and, to a certain extent, changeably, on the basis of new problems and new sensibilities”.
For Conde-Pumpido, this is the wide scope that the constitutional text grants to political forces. He described Tomás y Valiente as a staunch defender of “the constitutional order that emerged in 1978, which produced the greatest period of prosperity, freedom and harmony in the history of Spain”. But at the same time with an evolutionary conception of the Basic Law, since truth, as the laureate wrote in his Intellectual Autobiography, “is a cumulative process of truths”, and this implies that one “must learn with humility and relativity not a single and total truth (sic) to pursue, but partial truths, perhaps ephemeral or fleeting, perhaps contradictory, but not fruitless for that reason”.
Sources from the Constitutional Court interpret Conde-Pumpido’s speech on current occasions: the court, for example, is in the process of adapting its own doctrine on the right to abortion, with different arguments than in 1985, in order to open the first door to the decriminalization of voluntary abortion. And on the other hand in a context in which 65 lawsuits against four judges have accumulated. A single party, Vox, has filed 46 constitutional complaints during this legislature, each seeking the annulment, in whole or in part, of laws or legislative decrees passed by Parliament.
What affects most is what happens closer. Subscribe so you don’t miss anything.
subscribe to
Two of Tomás and Valiente’s children, Francisco and Ana, and the President of the Council of State, Magdalena Valerio, attended the ceremony; the interim president of the General Council of the Judiciary, Rafael Mozo; the rector of the Autonomous University “where the professor was shot dead on February 14, 1996”, Amaia Mendikoetxea; along with former court presidents and current judges. Finally, in front of the monolith with which the court honors the memory of Tomás y Valiente, Conde-Pumpido placed a bouquet of 27 red roses, one for each year that has passed since his assassination. Then there was a minute’s silence.