The Central Government announced yesterday that it will appeal to the Constitutional Court against the autonomous initiatives promoted by the PP and Vox which mean repealing the democratic memory legislation approved by the Courts.
This was advanced by La Hora de la 1 and confirmed after the headquarters of the ministry by the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres. The Government thus opens a new front with the PP and Vox regarding the repeals of the current law through the new legislation and autonomous decrees on democratic memory that it has approved or that are in the process of being approved in Aragon, in the Valencian Community and, more recently, in Castile and Leon.
In the specific case of the Aragonese initiative, which was approved in February, Minister Torres, after noting that the new law “violates several principles such as international law or human rights”, explained that this Tuesday he will raise the Council of Ministers a report to require the Regional Executive to, within the framework of a bilateral commission by way of Article 33.2 of the Constitutional Court law, agree to “sit down with the Government of Spain” and accept modify the rule. If this does not happen – he added – the central government will file an appeal of unconstitutionality.
Both “if they refuse” to go to this meeting and if they do not agree to modify the regional law, “automatically” the central government will file an appeal, announced the minister, who admitted that he sees it as “complicated” that they can reach an agreement to modify the norm
The same will happen, as explained by Torres, with respect to the proposals of law in the same sense that are processed in the Valencian and Castilian-Ollean chambers “if they are approved in the terms we know so far”. “The important thing would be for these proposals to decline”, indicated Torres.
The minister recalled that the Aragonese law “eliminates the map of graves, which makes it impossible or difficult to exhume victims (…), removes memorial sites and removes any tribute to the men and women of Aragon who they 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, which in the law of Democratic Memory is condemned”.
What the PP intends, “obliged and yielding” to Vox, insisted Torres, is to “equalize four decades of absence of liberties, deprivation of rights, disappearances and torture” with a democratic and legitimate period like the Republic . “And that is impossible to equal”, he said.
With regard to the effects of these repeals, the minister acknowledged that exhumations of victims of the Franco regime 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 victorious 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 this reason, after remembering that there is an item for each year for exhumations, he urged the PP and Vox to “not put sticks in the wheels” in this area.
On February 15, Aragon became the first community to repeal an autonomic law of democratic memory with the support of the three groups present in the Government: the PP, Vox and the Aragonese Regionalist Party.
In March, the PP and Vox presented to the Valencian Community, where they govern in coalition, a proposal for a “concord” law that will replace the current regional memory law and which, according to Vox, will eliminate the terms “civil war” and will maintain, they assure, the reparation of all the victims.
In the same vein, the PP and Vox, which govern together in Castilla y León, presented there five days later, on March 26, a “concord” law proposal to replace the current autonomous decree of historical memory.
This new rule does not include an express condemnation of what happened between the Civil War and the Spanish Constitution of 1978, it deletes the word “dictatorship” and refers only to Francoism as the period between 1939 and the arrival of democracy.
The spokesman for the PP, Borja Sémper, supported the initiative of the three governments, which, he said, “broaden the concept of victims”, and described it as “surprising” that the PSOE could be against it. “Everything that is moving forward, expanding and reaching more people seems very good to us and seems reasonable to us. Is there anyone in this country who does not want to rescue any victim of any justice?”, he questioned.
