If yesterday the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, accepted without any but the sentence of the Constitutional Court in which, without being the final one, he flatly rejected the appeal of this party against the Abortion law of José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, the deputy secretary institution of the formation, Esteban González Pons, warned this Friday that if any of the appellants takes the ruling to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, the sentence will most likely be annulled.
And it will be, said González Pons, because four of the magistrates that make up the plenary of the guarantee court and who, in his opinion, should have withdrawn from the deliberations and voting for having participated in some way in the elaboration of the norm did not do so. . “They should not have participated in the vote and in the ruling and now the sentence is likely to be annulled in Europe,” said the popular leader in an interview on TVE.
Yesterday, the progressive majority of the court knocked down the presentation of the conservative magistrate Enrique Arnaldo who proposed declaring unconstitutional the way of development of the right to information that must be provided to women who want to terminate their pregnancy and extend conscientious objection to all health workers who participate in the process. In the previous days, the TC refused to separate the conservative magistrate Concepción Espejel from the matter that she requested for having been a member of the General Council of the Judiciary when the body drafted a report on the bill. The TC also rejected the challenges raised by PP deputies of Espejel herself and of three progressive magistrates: President Cándido Conde-Pumpido and Juan Carlos Campo and Inmaculada Montalbán. Espejel and Montalbán were members of the CGPJ that wrote a report on the law; Conde-Pumpido was attorney general when the Fiscal Council issued its report and Campo was Secretary of State for Justice, which was the ministry that drafted the law.
The guarantee court thus avoided running out of a quorum to deliberate on the Abortion Law and kept intact the progressive majority that allowed Arnaldo’s paper to be rejected.
González Pons, who has been “concerned” by the possibility that Europe has to correct a Constitutional Court, in his opinion, “so politicized”, not because of the content of the sentence but because of “lack of equity” in the composition of the court and has insisted that the four challenged magistrates were in a clear position of recusal and should not have participated.
Regarding the words of Feijóo, who yesterday celebrated the TC’s decision because the deadline law is “correct” for “current Spain”, González Pons pointed out that the party’s position “has been that way for a long time, since we were the government and we reformed the law and we only reform what we do not share”, alluding to the reform that imposed parental consent on minors aged 16 and 17. In any case, he has assured “to be glad that the TC finally dictates its sentence and is marking the path”.
