The Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) partially upheld the appeal filed by the Chamber of Concessionaires of Infrastructure, Equipment and Public Services (CCIES) against the regulation on citizen participation approved by the plenary session of the Town Hall of Barcelona, in May 2022. during the mandate of the former mayor Ada Colau.
In the judgment, advanced by ‘La Vanguardia’ and consulted by the European Parliament, section 5 of the Contentious Chamber of the TSJC annuls the articles relating to citizen consultations, because it understands that this 2022 regulation corrects the shortcomings of a previous , from 2017, but “presents a high level of ambiguity when defining the purpose of the citizen consultations“the regulation therefore violates the principle of legal certainty.
“We must start from the regulatory technique used by the Town Hall, from the wholesale reference to state, regional and local legislation, without integrating its content into the different regulatory precepts, which generates legal uncertainty“said the judgment, which is not final and may be appealed to the Supreme Court.
The president of Ccies, Francesc Sibina, assured that “it is essential that public service providers can manage the awarded contracts with guarantees of stability in order to best satisfy the public interests entrusted to them” and regretted that it was necessary to go to court to preserve the rights of a public contract.
From the Ccies, they remember that even if the articles on citizen consultationswhich aimed to question the inhabitants of Barcelona about the municipalization of water, for example, the City Council can resort to other forms of participation regulated in the Regulations such as the City Hall, Neighborhood Councils, pacts and dialogue agreements, or public hearings.
