It is only a matter of days before the Official State Gazette publishes a legal reform allowing prisoners from other European countries to commute their sentences in Spain, including those imprisoned by ETA who are serving sentences in French prisons.
It will happen yes or yes but, while it happens, the latest measure taken by the PP will force the president of Congress, the socialist Francina Armengol, to speak for the first time on this controversial measure.
The confrontation between the two chambers is imminent: the popular claim to have found a “legal loophole” which allows them to veto the law, while the socialists accuse them of having rigged the regulations.
What happened is this. The President of the Senate, Pedro Rollanannounced that Monday’s vote against the reform approved in Congress could be considered a veto against the law, which returns to the Lower House, despite the fact that no party has registered amendments. Now Armengol must respond to this request and, a priori, convene a plenary session to decide whether or not to lift the aforementioned veto.
This means that the president and the Congressional Council will have to take a position on a law that burns the hands of socialists. Actually, the PSOE delegated to Sumar both the drafting of the text and its parliamentary and political defense. Until now, socialists continue to look the other way.
PP parliamentary sources stressed this Monday that the criticism of Rollán’s veto “demonstrates that the PSOE and Sánchez are defending Bildu in the face of the victims.”
A veto like this is unprecedented in a democracy and threatens to provoke a institutional shock between the two rooms. But the popular appeal to the report of the Secretary General of the Senate.
In this document, the lawyers of the Upper House argue that even if no party has presented a veto proposal, it must be understood that “a rejection by the absolute majority of the Senate plenary is an act that must have the effect legal veto, because it was agreed on a definitive and global basis, with the consequent return of the text to Congress”.
“It would be too formalistic to ignore the royal will of the Senate Plenary’s rejection,” the report continues.
“Neither the Constitution nor the Rules of the House prohibit the existence of a veto which is not formally presented as such,” he continues, in what parliamentary sources describe as a “legal gap”.
For political reasons, it is now the Congressional Council that must study the situation, also with reports from its own lawyers, and decide whether or not to accept the veto. If Armengol does so, he must propose a vote in Congress; Otherwise, he will enter into conflict with the Senate, will not recognize its decision and will consider the law approved.
The socialist spokesperson in Congress, Patxi Lopezconsiders that Rollán’s maneuver is a legal trick and suggested that, while waiting for the report of the lawyers of the Lower House, for the PSOE “there was no veto, but a vote against”. “The rule could be addressed directly to the BOE,” he said.
Last week, when it became known that this rule would benefit ETA detainees, sources within the PP leadership initially declared that they had no room for action, since they did not had not presented amendments or veto proposals. So much so that the People’s Party decided to delay the debate for a week to put pressure on the government to withdraw the bill from Congress. It wasn’t like that.
Nobody expected the movement of the President of the Senate this Monday. A veto by the Upper House implies having first presented a complete amendment, which no one has done, and then debate and vote; If the veto succeeds, the following week it is debated in a plenary session of Congress, which can lift it by an absolute majority.
A harmless procedure
In principle, the first draft reform of Organic Law 7/2014, of March 2024, did not include the effects that we know today. In fact, its documentary annex included the same official reports commissioned two years earlier from the Council of State, the Fiscal Council, the CGPJ and the Ministries of the Interior and Justice. The trap amendment appeared three months later, in June.
The groups recorded a total of 13 amendmentsincluding five from Sumar. It’s the latter two that made all the noise: one removes certain limitations and the other cancels the only additional provision of the law, which is why it could not be applied to convictions prior to August 15, 2010 .
Once the amendments were registered, the text was debated between the parties on July 31 at noon in the Lázaro Dou room of the Congress of Deputies. These meetings are held behind closed doors and result in a report on the law concerned; This report is submitted to the Justice Commission and from there it is debated in plenary.
For the presentation, the PP elected the deputies José Manuel Velasco, Rafael Benigno Belmonte and María Jesús Moro; The latter replaced Ana Vázquez, spokesperson for the Interior, who was unable to be present that day. All groups voted in favor, except for the three representatives of Vox (Javier Ortega-Smith, Carlos Flores and Emilio Jesús del Valle), who abstained.
All amendments were accepted, except one from Sumar, two from Podemos and one from Junts.
The report was ratified on September 10 by the Justice Commission, also with the support of the PP. Vox symbolically voted against, declared its deputies, “in order not to give even a drop of oxygen to this government”. A week later, on the 17th, the opinion arrived in plenary session and there, yes, all the deputies present (four were missing) approved the reform which reduces the sentences of ETA members: 346 yes.
