The Table of the Congress of Deputies has not resolved this Thursday how the entangled situation of the United We Can Deputy Alberto Rodríguez remains, after a long internal debate in an extraordinary session called urgently to clarify the open institutional conflict with one of the most relevant bodies of the Judicial Power. The Board has only decided for now to ask the Supreme Court for a further clarification on “the effects” of its sentence in which it condemned the parliamentarian for kicking a policeman at a concentration in La Laguna in 2014. The governing body of the Cortes has been divided in the debate, in the end there has been a fixation of positions, five members (two from the PSOE and three from United We Can) have chosen to demand that the Supreme Court determine whether executing the disqualification means withdrawing the seat, three have voted against (two from the PP and one from Vox) and the president, Meritxell Batet, has not opted for her vote, although at another point in the debate she has come to recognize that in the end the sentence will have to be executed and remove the I seat the deputy. The Supreme Court would now have three days to respond and the next Board will meet again next Tuesday.
The meeting of the Board of Congress began this Thursday around two in the afternoon and did not end until almost 4.30 p.m., after an intense debate, where positions have been widely divided between the two ideological blocs present in the organ of House government, the five progressive components and the three conservatives. The majority made up of the PSOE and United We Can understand that the position reiterated on Wednesday by an official of the Supreme Court in which Congress was urged to point out from when the disqualification of Deputy Rodríguez was proceeded should not immediately imply the withdrawal of his seat for the rest of the legislature and advocated to demand the president of that room, Manuel Marchena, an unequivocal clarification.
The representatives of the right had no doubts and ratified that the parliamentarian should leave his seat now and, failing that, even resign imminently. The components of the PP and Vox, in addition, warned Batet that the decision and responsibility in this case corresponded to her and also its consequences, which from the progressive sector was understood as an added pressure and even a threat. Meritxell Batet has consulted on this aspect with the Secretary General of the Chamber, who according to various sources has confirmed that indeed the competence of how the Supreme Court’s ruling is carried out corresponded only to the president. It was at that moment when Batet expressed his personal opinion about this conflict for the first time and according to several of those present he advanced that he was “clear” that after the new office of the Supreme Court the sentence should mean the loss of the deputy seat. But even after advancing that criterion, Batet has requested a half-hour recess to reflect and then has issued a statement in which he does not express that position and limits himself to demanding clarifications from the Supreme Court.
In Batet’s statement it is only reported that at the Board meeting this Thursday the agreement had been adopted, “by a majority of 5 to 3”, to “request clarification from the Supreme Court on the effects of its ruling on the condition as a deputy for Mr. Alberto Rodriguez, without prejudice to the competence of the President of Congress to respond to the Supreme Court office received yesterday on the beginning of the calculation of the sentence ”. This last sentence is also interpreted differently according to each sector of the Table consulted. The fourth vice president, Ignacio Gil Lázaro, of Vox, considered that Batet had clearly opted in the meeting in favor of his thesis of removing Rodríguez from his seat and then only indicated that he was going to communicate it to the president of the Supreme Court. The second vice president, Ana Pastor, and the secretary of the Board, Adolfo Suárez Illana, also joined in this idea and took the opportunity to ensure that neither the Board nor the president should look for “more excuses or delaying maneuvers” to postpone the withdrawal of the I seat the deputy of Podemos. Vox and PP did point out that if Batet changed the opinion he had expressed within the appointment or did not imminently execute the sentence of the Supreme Court, he could be breaching a sentence and accepting “dark and scandalous pressures.”
From the PSOE and Podemos not only do they not assume that version but they offer a totally opposite reading. Gerardo Pisarello and Javier Sánchez Serna, representatives of United We Can in the Table, defended that with their request for clarifications to the Supreme Court, Batet had enshrined “parliamentary autonomy” because they would understand it as something very serious that a court could eliminate the condition of deputy for almost two years for a sanction that had been punished with only 45 days in prison and 540 euros of fine. And they added as a warning that if that decision is carried out in the end it could end up in all Spanish and European courts.
The Board had considered this Tuesday, at its previous meeting and in view of a report from the Chamber’s lawyers and with the opposition of PP and Vox, that the “special disqualification for the exercise of the right to passive suffrage” that it had imposed the Supreme Court was paid, since it was accompanied by a penalty of a month and a half in jail, replaced in the ruling by a fine of 540 euros. The Supreme Court did not share that criterion and immediately went to the president of the Chamber, Meritxell Batet, to urge her to clarify when she planned to execute the sentence that, according to that interpretation, would deprive deputy Alberto Rodríguez of his seat, something that until now only has happened with the leaders of the you process.
There is no precedent identical to that of the United Podemos parliamentarian, but there are decisions of the Electoral Board and the Supreme Court’s Contentious-Administrative Chamber that, according to court sources, should now serve as jurisprudence. Among others, the disabling of the expresident Quim Torra for “supervening ineligibility” before there was a final judgment that forced him to leave his post. This figure was also used against Oriol Junqueras, the leader of ERC, to withdraw his status as MEP after being sentenced to 13 years in prison.
This resolution makes reference to article 6.2.a of the electoral law, which establishes that those “sentenced by final judgment, to custodial sentence, are ineligible for the period that the sentence lasts.” But in the case of the deputy from United We Can, the prison sentence has been commuted to a fine, so the lawyers in Congress maintain that this precept can no longer be applied. In the Supreme Court there are doubts about this interpretation, but, in any case, the Criminal Chamber considers that the disqualification sentence has not been commuted with the fine and the deputy must comply with it.
The Table resolved this past Tuesday, with the support of the six members of the PSOE and United We Can in front of the three of the PP and Vox, that the parliamentarian could continue with his seat, although precisely in these days he hardly appears publicly by Congress and does not it is seen by the plenary session. The debate was bitter both at the Table and at the subsequent Board of Spokespersons.
PP and Vox questioned the idea, endorsed by the majority, clinging to the lawyers’ report, that the fine applied actually replaced the main penalty. The fourth secretary of the Table, the popular deputy Adolfo Suárez Illana, argued at the meeting that the case is “a manifest situation of supervening ineligibility, which should deprive the right to passive suffrage ope legis [”por el dictado de la ley”] and, therefore, it entails the loss of said status as a deputy for which he was elected in the last general elections ”. And it refutes the thesis that if the Supreme Court had considered that the fine “was already the nature of the penalty, or its resultant, it would not carry the accessory of special disqualification on which the court has insisted in its statement clarifying the sentence. ”.
The pulse with the Supreme Court comes two weeks after the leadership of Congress suffered another setback in the Constitutional Court, which annulled the restriction of activities of the Chamber at the beginning of the pandemic for violating the rights of the deputies. That sentence caused strong discomfort among the Government parties. Batet herself came out to recall that several regional parliaments were closed in those days and that Vox, the author of the appeal before the Constitutional Court, also requested the suspension of a plenary session after one of its deputies became infected.
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