In December 2019, the PP and the Ciudadanos right decided to open the legislature by appealing to the Constitutional Court. Both parties questioned the fact that several MPs swore or pledged their positions and obeyed the constitution with expressions that did not follow the classical formulas. This was not the first time this had happened, and the Court of Guarantee had recently issued a judgment in which it guarantees that a parliamentary office can be sworn or promised, for example, to the “Republic of Catalonia” by “legal imperative”. or shouting “Long live the workers. Now the Constitution has established that this type of promises to protect the Constitution is also valid and does not violate the rights of the rest of the deputies.
Members of the current Congress of Deputies were sworn in and sworn in on December 3, 2019. Several members of the table, such as Ignacio Gil Lázaro (Vox), deviated from the norm by swearing in the chair “for Spain”. Other parliamentarians, such as Gerardo Pizzarello and Javier Sánchez Cerán (Unidas Podemos), did the same for the “Thirteen Roses” and “Democracy and Social Rights”. A total of 29 parliamentarians did this.
This was not the first case, and not only at the Congress of Deputies. Already in 2016, for example, Pablo Iglesias signed the constitution, but promised to “work to change it”, even before using sign language. Deputies from pro-independence parties in Catalonia also took up Magna Carta, but claimed they would do so out of “legal imperative” or promised to do so in order to achieve a “Catalan Republic” constitution.
Almost four years later, the Constitutional Court settled the debate and ruled in a proposal that alternative formulas for the protection of the Constitution and the oath or promise of parliamentary office are also valid. The magistrates, with several dissenting votes, explained that Battet’s decision to approve this compliance did not result in “unequal treatment” between MPs. Their admission, he adds, did not negatively affect the ability of other MPs to perform their parliamentary functions.
Four magistrates from the conservative bloc voted specifically against it. Ricardo Enriquez, Enrique Arnaldo and Concepcion Espejel explain that any expression that is not related to conformity is not valid, and Cesar Tolosa believes that this type of conformity “denaturalizes the legally constituted collective and joint representation of the Spanish people belonging to the general wounds. Accordingly, this undermines the essence of the state of the deputies”, explains this dissenting opinion.
Source: El Diario
