Opinió

 

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Vicent Partal

02.09.2014

Holier than the Pope

As we explain today, the Spanish government systematically and repeatedly disobeys the sentences of the Constitutional Court that politically disfavour it, and I’m not talking about one or two, but many. In some cases very openly and with clear premeditation. There are for example 2 sentences of the Constitutional Court on different questions concerning the management and concessions of subsidies for care and social services, TEN, which the Government of Catalonia won and the Spanish government has never applied between 2011 and 2013. But nothing has been done about it.


And when I say nothing, I mean nothing. The ministers responsible for breaching the orders of the Constitutional Court have not been arrested, nor has the Prime Minister been put in prison. But obviously, what the sentences of the Constitutional Court imposed has not been done, but rather what the Spanish government wanted to do, contrary to the sentence, and that is that.

This is not one case alone. The PP have absolutely no qualms about disobeying the Constitutional Court. In the late 1990s, for example, the court established that the expression 'Catalan' could legally be used to refer to 'Valencia’ and required all university titles in Catalan to be valid. Nearly twenty years later, the government of Valencia still systematically and constantly breaches the sentence and a handful of similar sentences of the Superior Court of Justice. And shall I say it again? Nothing has been done about it. Absolutely nothing.

So when someone says that the government of Catalonia cannot be expected to disobey a sentence of the Constitutional Court, we must rightly think that they are biased and ignorant, that they voluntarily and so often ignore the times that the Spanish government has disobeyed sentences of the Constitutional Court. And that what they also intend is to reduce the awkward and diverse legal debate to nothing, a debate about which I am sure we will hear a lot in the coming days.

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