A judge from Madrid has requested the Prosecutor's Office to issue a report regarding a complaint filed by the association Hazte Oír against Sofía Puente, sister of the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, and senior official of the Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Courts, following the 'grandchildren's law'.
According to a ruling from the head of the Court of Plaza 35 of the Court of Instance of Madrid, which Europa Press has accessed, the magistrate Inmaculada Lova asks the Public Ministry to express its opinion on the "admission and proceedings to be carried out" in the complaint from Hazte Oír for an alleged crime of administrative prevarication.
In the indictment, which this agency has also accessed, the association attributes to the 'grandchildren's law' irregularities linked to an additional provision of the Democratic Memory Law, approved in 2022, which opened the possibility of obtaining nationality for descendants of Spanish exiles.
Hazte Oír argues that Puente issued an "instruction" that "exceeded" the scope provided in the 'grandchildren's law', despite the fact that, according to the complaint, the responsible party had committed "to the strict application of the law".
Application to great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren
The association claims that this instruction was adopted "behind the back" of the then Minister of Justice, Pilar Llop, "from whom she depended hierarchically" and that, according to journalistic information cited in the complaint, "they do not rule out that the instruction responded to a direct indication" from Félix Bolaños, then Minister of the Presidency and current Minister of Justice.
This context would have led, according to Hazte Oír's account, to Puente's rise to the General Secretariat for Innovation and Quality of Public Justice Service when Bolaños took over that department.
The complaint emphasizes that "the exclusion of the minister of the branch and the personal connection of the accused with the minister who drafted the law indicate the channel through which the indication of the change of criteria could have been transmitted" and adds that "the subsequent promotion of the accused, agreed precisely by Bolaños upon assuming the Justice portfolio, is an objective fact whose eventual correspondence with the events must be clarified by the instruction".
Hazte Oír also claims that, in practice, applications from great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren are being accepted, despite the legal text "restricting the right of option to 'those born outside of Spain to a father or mother, grandfather or grandmother'."
The association insists that "the extension of the pathway to later generations --great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren-- lacks any legal support and can only be explained by the chaining of successive options that the instruction makes possible by having eliminated the prerequisite of exile."
In the same vein, it recalls that the PSOE senator César Mogo "stated that the norm protects those who emigrated to America for any reason since the 19th century, regardless of the causes that triggered the exodus" and concludes that this "confirms that the extension operated by the instruction was not an interpretive excess noticed late, but a known and proclaimed design."
Electoral Impact and Vox's Lawsuit
The association also maintains that "around 2.6 million applications have been processed" and that "press estimates put the number of new voters who could join the external census before the natural end of the legislature at about 600,000."
In its argumentation, Hazte Oír asserts that "the effect on electoral results has ceased to be conjecture" and cites as an example that, in the Andalusian elections held last May, "the governing party, clearly defeated in the votes cast in Spain, nevertheless won in the vote of the Electoral Census of Absent Residents (CERA)."
Although the Government has indicated that "the majority of applications cannot be resolved before the next general elections," the lawsuit notes that "the massive naturalization process continues its course and will deploy its full effects in the subsequent electoral cycles."
At the same time, Vox has filed another lawsuit against Sofía Puente for alleged administrative prevarication also linked to the 'grandchildren's law'. In its document, which Europa Press has accessed, the party refers to two instructions that, in its opinion, modified the application of the norm and that "frontalmente violate the limits that constrain the competence of the instructions."
Vox believes that with those directives "it alters the subjective and temporal scope of a right recognized by law, with direct implications for third parties and for the electoral body."
The party details that "none of the instructions were aimed at resolving a specific case," but rather "set, with a vocation for general and indefinite application, criteria, the presumption of exile by mere accreditation of kinship, first, and the equating of the mere request for a prior appointment to the formalization of the declaration of option within the deadline, afterwards."
According to the complaint, the application of those instructions has meant "an increase in the number of people who, without individually accrediting the political exile of their cause, have obtained Spanish nationality and, with it, their registration in the CERA."
Vox concludes that "this effect on the electoral body is not an unforeseen collateral effect, but a natural and foreseeable consequence of expanding, by means of instruction and without legal coverage, a right of option to nationality whose extension was reserved for the legislator," a consequence that, in their view, "it is reasonable to presume was not foreign" to Puente.