The Plenary of the Constitutional Court (TC) has dismissed this Friday the appeal of unconstitutionality presented by the Popular Parliamentary Group in Congress against the education law or ‘Celaá law’, approved in 2006 by the socialist government and which introduced modifications in 2020 with the current Executive. As was the case with the challenge raised by Vox, which was resolved in mid-April, the rule goes ahead by six votes to four, since the progressive magistrate Juan Carlos Campo refrained from intervening in the deliberation due to his past as minister of Justice.
The sentence, whose rapporteur was the progressive magistrate Laura Díez, refers to the recent jurisprudence regarding the prohibition of arranging differentiated education by sex, according to which the legislator does not have the constitutional duty to promote it (finance it) if it considers that it exists a pedagogical model in accordance with the Constitution that is better suited to the superior values of the legal system proclaimed in the Magna Carta.
In this sense, the Constitution grants a margin of freedom of configuration to the legislator so that, within the framework that the fundamental norm allows, he can establish his political options, which entails incorporating into the law his ideological conceptions and the measures to guarantee that his forecasts “have real and effective efficacy”.
The court of guarantees also dismisses by reference the derogation of the criterion of “social demand” in the programming of centers and places, since the programming of education with the objective of guaranteeing the existence of sufficient public places is a constitutionally legitimate aim, between within the margin of free configuration of the legislator and the political preferences expressed in the laws approved in the Cortes Generales.
On the other hand, from the current wording of the education law, which came into force in 2021 after approving some modifications, it does not follow that the mere existence of sufficient public places will lead to the denial of a concert. The charges of unconstitutionality raised by the PP regarding the teaching of religion are now also dismissed; the schooling of students with special needs; local cooperation in obtaining the necessary lots for the construction of new public educational centers; and the right to receive education in Spanish.
Own languages, “terminological question”
The PP argued that by designating in the ‘Celaá law’ as “own” the co-official language of the autonomous community, as opposed to the subject in which Spanish is studied, which it calls “Castilian language and literature”, it means considering it “not own”. The sentence rejects this challenge because this terminological question has no effect on the linguistic regime of education, given that the law uses “co-official” and “proper” interchangeably and does so, moreover, in the sense of peculiar, characteristic or exclusive to an autonomous community, unlike Spanish, which is the language shared by all.
Conservative magistrates Ricardo Enríquez, Enrique Arnaldo, César Tolosa and magistrate Concepción Espejel have announced the formulation of a dissenting opinion, in line with the arguments that they already presented when the plenary rejected Vox’s appeal last April.
In that sentence, the court concluded, among other issues, that it is constitutional to withdraw public funding from schools that segregate by sex and that the norm contemplates “a pattern of balance or equality” between Spanish and the co-official languages. The majority of the TC also pointed out that the law orders attention to “the wishes of families who express their preference for the most inclusive regime” in special education and considers the absence of mention of religion as a subject in the educational curriculum constitutional. ‘Celaá law’.
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