The Constitutional Court endorses the law that gives legal personality to the Mar Menor and rejects Vox’s appeal

The Constitutional Court has rejected the appeal that Vox presented against the law that, since 2022, recognizes the Mar Menor as its own legal personality. The plenary session, with seven votes in favor and five against, has decided to reject the allegations of the extreme and endorses the norm that recognizes the lagoon’s rights to “protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration” and to “exist as an ecosystem” after been in a critical situation for several years.

The matter has been sentenced after several calls in which the presentation has been withdrawn for a more in-depth analysis of the matter, including modifications until this Wednesday. Sources from the court tell elDiario.es that five dissenting judges of the court will present a dissenting opinion in the coming days.

The norm that the court of guarantees now endorses reached Parliament through a Popular Legislative Initiative (ILP) promoted by more than 640,000 signatures. A citizen movement that channeled the alerts of experts and environmentalists about how the Mar Menor had been transformed into a “green soup” as a result of the continuous discharges from agriculture. The first anoxia arrived in 2019 with the death of thousands of fish, an event that would be repeated in 2021.

The emergency situation in the lagoon was accompanied by demonstrations by thousands of people demanding greater protection for the Mar Menor and a regional law that expanded the ban on using chemical fertilizers. The rule that chose to climb a step in its level of protection and grant it its own legal personality came forward in Congress at the end of 2022 with the opposition of Vox, which finally appealed the law to the Constitutional Court.

The practical consequences of the law were manifested, for example, in the case of what is known as Jenny pond: a deposit of mining contaminants located a few meters from homes in Llano del Beal. A court in Cartagena, applying the rule, decided to give legal representatives of the lagoon permission to appear in a case “in order to safeguard the rights of the Mar Menor.”