The Bureau of Congress, with the votes of the PSOE and Sumar, yesterday processed the proposed amnesty law registered by the socialist parliamentary group with the endorsement of the lawyers’ report and the angry rejection of the PP.
The Bureau also approved the calendar of the House, which includes the solemn opening of the legislature on November 28 and the beginning of the ordinary period of sessions on December 12, this means that, if there is no extraordinary convocation of the president of the Congress, Francina Armengol, on December 12 the plenary could vote to take into consideration the organic law and, also, the processing by way of urgency.
The PP voted against it citing the alleged unconstitutionality of the initiative and resorted to an ad hominem against the chief lawyer of Congress to contradict his previous report on the rule. The reports of the lawyers of the Chamber that inform the Bureau are mandatory, but not binding.
The fact is that these lawyers, and consequently the Bureau, rejected the processing of the amnesty law proposals registered during the last legislature by pro-independence groups. Under the presidency of Meritxell Batet and with the votes of the right-wing and the PSOE, the Bureau of Congress rejected, already two years ago, processing the amnesty proposal registered at the time.
Nevertheless, the report of the lawyers that gives rise to the current initiative reviews in detail all the jurisprudential doctrine accumulated and establishes a new criterion according to which, without entering into the final constitutionality of the rule – a previous filter that the Constitution expressly prohibits -, if there is no “palmar and obvious” unconstitutionality nothing prevents its processing.
The controversy lies in this definition: “Palmary and obvious” refers to an obvious abuse of rights. In sentence 135 of 2004, cited in the report, it is pointed out that the mere unconstitutionality of the initiative, because it requires a constitutional reform, cannot disauthorize the legislature to process a law proposal: “The fact that such an initiative can only to prosper successfully if the Constitution is first reformed, as the State’s lawyer maintains, does not turn the proposal by itself (…) into an unconstitutional initiative”.
A previous decision of the Constitutional Court, 124 of 1995, already established this express prohibition of an a priori judgment of unconstitutionality: “In the event that the possibly unconstitutional law proposal reaches the final form of law and these eventual vices persist of unconstitutionality, only to this court, when the subjects legitimated to do so request it, it would be appropriate to pronounce on the constitutionality of this future law or not”.
For this reason, the senior lawyer of the Congress points out in his conclusions that, beyond the formal relevance of a law proposal, “the only circumstance in which the Bureau has the obligation to reject admission to the procedure is the case in which, on the initiative in question, there has already been a previous pronouncement of the Constitutional Court”.
The amnesty law is not one of these cases, because the Constitutional Court has never openly spoken against its pertinence and there is also no express prohibition in the constitutional text.
That is why the lawyers of the Congress base the reasons for the report against the initiative of the pro-independence groups on another concept, that of the general pardon: “It has not been based on the possible consideration of the amnesty as an unconstitutional figure , since the Bureau has not pronounced in reference to this, but, instead, it must be insisted on the fact that the base initiative entails a general pardon, and this is prohibited in an express way by the Constitution”. In this sense, the report returns to the pronouncement of the same court regarding the amnesty law of 1977.
This is the reason why the legal report that yesterday was debated at length in the Congressional Bureau, without prejudging the constitutionality of the organic law that comes out of the legislature based on the proposal registered by the socialist group, considers that it does not the debate in the plenary session or the consideration must be stopped, as long as the form adopted is not that of the general pardon and, therefore, this “palm and obvious unconstitutionality” to which al· it plays the jurisprudence of the Constitutional.
So things are, Cuca Gamarra, still parliamentary spokesperson for the PP, attributed a presumed lack of forcefulness in this report to the relief to the general secretary of the Congress of Deputies and announced that his parliamentary group will ask the Bureau for a reconsideration of the decision adopted yesterday, an initiative that has been supported by the ultra-right formation Vox.
The Bureau also blessed that the proposed law be processed through the emergency route, although this decision must also be voted on in the same plenary in which the taking into consideration of the rule is debated. The urgency halves the deadlines for presenting amendments, both partial and vetoes, and the return to full Congress for the final vote.
The emergency procedure means that, a priori, the Senate would only have twenty days to issue a report and vote on the law proposal, but the express reform of the regulations that the absolute majority of the PP has approved in the Upper House grants it two months for the discussion of the rule, although appeals of unconstitutionality are processed against this regulatory reform with a request for a precautionary suspension, so that the Constitutional Court could force the Senate to resolve it in twenty days.
