The Government announced that it will appeal to the Constitutional Court against the regional initiatives promoted by PP and Vox that involve the repeal of previous democratic memory laws. This was announced in La Hora de la 1 and later confirmed from the ministry headquarters by the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, in relation to the repeals of the autonomous laws and decrees on democratic memory that have been carried out. in Aragon and that are being processed in the Valencian Community and, more recently, in Castilla y León.
In the specific case of the Aragonese initiative, which was approved in February, Minister Torres, after verifying that the new law “violates several principles such as international law or human rights,” explained that this Tuesday he will submit a report to the Council of Ministers. to require the regional Executive to agree to “sit down with the Government of Spain” and agree to modify the rule within the framework of a bilateral commission through article 33.2 of the Constitutional Court law. If this does not happen – he added – the Government will file an appeal for unconstitutionality. Whether “if they refuse” to attend that meeting or if they do not agree to modify the autonomous rule, the Government will “automatically” present an appeal, announced the minister, who admitted that it is “complicated” for them to reach an agreement to modify the rule.
The same will happen, as Torres explained, with respect to law proposals in the same sense that are processed in the Valencian and Castilian-Leonese chambers. “The important thing would be for these proposals to decline, for them not to move forward,” Torres indicated, however.
The minister recalled that the Aragonese law “eliminates the map of graves, which makes exhumations of victims impossible or difficult (…), eliminates places of memory and removes any tribute to the men and women of Aragon who lost their lives. in the Nazi concentration camps.
For the head of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, what the PP and Vox are doing in these autonomous communities is “inadmissible” and he denounced that these legislative initiatives are an attempt to “whitewash stages of our history such as the dictatorship that in the law of “Democratic Memory is condemned.” What the PP intends, “forced and yielding” to Vox, Torres insisted is to “equate four decades of absence of freedoms, deprivation of rights, disappearances and torture” with a democratic and legitimate period such as the Republic. “And this is impossible to match,” he snapped.
Regarding the effects of these repeals, the minister acknowledged that exhumations of victims of Francoism could be paralyzed and emphasized that the Memory Law “does not distinguish between victims” on one side or the other. However, he pointed out that what happens is that “the victims of the winning side were already exhumed with Franco alive and their families rewarded and honored, while those who were defeated and defended democracy and freedom remained in those wells for four years.” . For this reason, after remembering that there is a budget for exhumations each year, he appealed to PP and Vox to “not put any brakes on the wheels” in this area.
On February 15, Aragón became the first community to repeal an autonomous law of democratic memory with the support of the three groups present in the Government: PP, Vox and PAR.
Next, PP and Vox presented on March 21 in the Valencian Community, where they govern in coalition, a proposed law of “concord” that will replace the current autonomous law of memory and that, according to Vox, will eliminate the terms “war-civilist” ” and will maintain reparation for all victims.
Along the same lines, the PP and Vox, which govern together in Castilla y León, presented there on March 26 a proposed law of “concord” to replace the current autonomous decree of historical memory. This new norm does not include an express condemnation of what happened between the Civil War and the Spanish Constitution of 1978, while at the same time it eliminates the word “dictatorship” to refer only as Francoism to the period between 1939 and the arrival of democracy.
