The amnesty law proposal has received the first endorsement for debate in Congress. The initiative was admitted for processing this Tuesday by the Chamber Board and will probably obtain the green light from the plenary session to begin its final preparation process on December 12. PSOE and Sumar asserted their majority in the Table against the vote against the PP and after an intense legal debate.
The popular parties deployed several arguments with the aim of preventing the initiative from even being debated in plenary. On the one hand, they had presented a document challenging the Chamber’s senior lawyer, Fernando Galindo, for lack of impartiality, head of the team that authored the legal report that supported the proposal being qualified by the Board for parliamentary processing. The PP argued that Galindo served until recently as undersecretary of the Ministry of Territorial Policy and his wife as general director of Relations with the Cortes, a closeness to the Government that, according to the popular ones, questions his impartiality to issue a technical opinion.
Faced with Galindo’s favorable report, the PP opposed the agreement reached by the Board in the previous legislature, at that time with the favorable vote of the PSOE, which refused to accept for processing an amnesty proposal presented by the nationalist groups. Then the governing body of the Chamber took into account another report from the previous senior lawyer who ruled that the amnesty does not fit into the Constitution and, therefore, the matter could not be debated through a simple bill. “What was unconstitutional two years ago cannot be constitutional now,” said the second vice president of Congress, the popular José Antonio Bermúdez de Castro.
The representatives of PSOE and Sumar at the Table, with the president, Francia Armengol, at the head, rejected the challenge of Galindo, who belongs to the body of lawyers of the Cortes. And they relied on his report to defend that there are no legal obstacles that prevent debate on the initiative. If two years ago the lawyers opposed qualifying the amnesty proposal of the nationalists, it was because it had a different content from the current one and did collide with the Constitution, as defended by the first vice president of the Table, the socialist Alfonso Rodríguez Gómez de Celis . The representatives of the left also appealed to another report from the previous legal services in which the door was opened to study an amnesty law for civil guards sanctioned for union activities that the law prohibited.
PSOE and Sumar also accepted another of the arguments of the lawyers’ latest opinion, which rejects that the Congressional Board can establish prior control over the constitutionality of the initiatives to block their debate, unless their content flagrantly clashes with some ruling of the Constitutional Court. They gave as an example that last week, with the favorable vote of the PP, they admitted to processing a Vox initiative that calls for outlawing the pro-independence parties, a measure contrary to the rights enshrined in the fundamental law.
The PP will now submit a new document to the Board to review its decision to qualify the amnesty proposal. It will be rejected at an upcoming meeting of the governing body of the Lower House and from that moment on the popular ones will most likely present their first appeal to the Constitutional Court.
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The Board’s forecast is that the controversial bill will be submitted to the plenary session on December 12. The next day, the first control session will be held with questions to the Government. A week before, on the 5th, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, will appear to present the Government’s position on the Gaza war. And before that, on the 29th, the Kings will go to the Chamber for the solemn opening session of the new legislature.
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