The new judge of the Constitutional Court (TC), the conservative José María Macías, has decided not to voluntarily deviate from the deliberations on the amnesty that begins this Tuesday at the High Courtaccording to what legal sources have indicated to LaSexta. He does so despite having been proposed by the Popular Party and having publicly declared on numerous occasions his rejection of amnesty.
This leaves the balance of power between six progressive magistrates and five conservatives in the TC to debate the amnesty, after the departure of the former minister and magistrate Juan Carlos Campo. According to these sources, the magistrate has carried out a “reflection” and will defend his participation in the debate “without departing” from the doctrine that the Constitutional Court itself established in an order of December 15, 2021, in which the appeals were rejected. . of judges Enrique Arnaldo and Concepción Espejel raised by Oriol Junqueras and other convicts in the trial of process.
This Tuesday, the Constitutional Court begins the plenary session during which the admission to the treatment of the question of unconstitutionality raised by the Supreme Court regarding the crime of aggravated public disorder will be debated. The Second Chamber indicated in an order that the amnesty “violates constitutional law to equality before the law, as well as to the principles of legal certainty and the prescription of arbitrariness required by the Spanish Constitution.”
Here’s what the court says about these cases
As for the author who speaks of bias, (107/2021) rejected Arnaldo’s challenge, considering that was not justified by the opinions he expressed in a newspaper on the Catalan question or the signing of a manifesto five years before acquiring the status of magistrate, “without even having initiated any criminal proceedings against any of the challengers before the ordinary jurisdiction, and in which he demanded respect for the decisions of the Constitutional Court, the Constitution and the statute of autonomy”.
The order also established that academic work cannot justify “a well-founded suspicion of bias, even if their thesis was contrary to that defended by one or other of the parties.” Precisely, “academic work, when it deserves such a label – as the work analyzed does – is characterized by the hypothesis of participation in a rational discussion in a perspective subject to debate and reflection by the scientific community.”
For this reason, they add, “it is never definitive in its conclusions since it implicitly admits opposing positions and remains open to modifications in the face of more reasonable or better justified arguments. Such an open nature, and intellectually subject to debate, not only does not conflict but also joins the very foundation of the idea of impartiality”, indicates the order, citing the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court itself.
In this resolution, the Constitutional Court also defended that “no one can therefore be disqualified as a judge on the basis of his ideas and, consequently,it would not be constitutionally possible to revoke the dismissed judgeseven if the attitudes attributed to them were true.”
