The Constitutional Court endorses the law that provides the Mar Menor with legal personality

The plenary session of the Constitutional Court has endorsed the Law for the recognition of legal personality to the Mar Menor lagoon and has pointed out that it is a “singular” norm, which creates a new type of legal entity, seeking to provide it with a series of specific rights linked to your environmental protection.

According to this court, this is stated in a ruling that rejects the appeal of unconstitutionality promoted by Vox against that law, of which the magistrate has been a speaker Maria Luisa Segoviano. The ruling has been approved by seven votes from the progressive sector, compared to five from the conservative bloc.

The legal personality of the Mar Menor is part of a new technique in environmental law which is part of an international movement, booming in the last decade, that promotes the recognition of the so-called rights of nature.

The appellants understood that Law 19/2022 cannot be considered basic for the purposes of article 149.1.23 of the Constitution because it does not apply to the entire national territory. However, the complaint was dismissed applying constitutional doctrine that has already recognized that that article can cover laws with a physical scope delimited within the national territory.

This dismissal of arguments from Vox’s appeal is made from the perspective of competencies without ruling on the timeliness of the measures it contains; such as its technical quality, suitability or success, nor on other jurisdictional aspects not raised in the unconstitutionality appeal.

The plenary session also rejected the challenge for violation of articles 10.1, 24.1 and 45 of the Constitution, and recalls a ruling from 1995, which recognized the environment as a “essentially anthropocentric concept”. However, it was also said there that it is a relative, concrete and dynamic concept. The court explains that it is the legislator who must determine the appropriate techniques to carry out the guiding principle of article 45 of the Constitution, and now it has taken a more ecocentric view.

It is also emphasized that the attribution of legal personality is different from physical personalitywithout undermining human dignity, and that the Constitution does not reserve guardianship effective judicial for a certain type of people.

The ruling discards the complaint related to the principle of legal certainty, which the lawsuit linked to the vague nature of the rights conferred on the new legal entity. This places us at the level of legislative technique and prevents the objection from being successful. The applicability of the single repealing provision of this law will depend on the ordinary methods of interpretation in law.

Finally, the violation of articles 9.3, 25.1 and 81.1 of the Constitution is rejected and the ruling rules out the violation of articles 25.1 and 81.1, given that the textuality of the law shows that it does not infractions, crimes, sanctions or penalties are being classified. Likewise, bankruptcy is excluded from article 9.3 of the Constitution, because Questions of legislative technique or technical rigor are foreign to the Constitutional Court.