The deputy spokesperson of Sumar in Congress, Enrique Santiago, has reproached the Supreme Court for questioning that, as stated in the instruction from the Ministry of Justice to apply the so-called "grandchildren's law," all people who left Spain after the Civil War "fleeing from Francoism" can be considered "exiles."
In statements to the "Parlamento" program of RNE, collected by Europa Press, Santiago defended his group's decision to take advantage of the processing in Congress of the Organic Law for the improvement of Education to register an amendment to safeguard the voting rights of the descendants of exiles.
With this initiative, Sumar aims to render ineffective the precautionary suspension agreed by the Supreme Court for those who were already registered in the Electoral Census of Absent Residents (CERA) and obtained nationality thanks to the provision of the Democratic Memory Law known as the "grandchildren's law."
Voting rights are only removed in dictatorships
The also spokesperson for Justice of Sumar detailed that they resorted to the first norm with organic rank whose deadline for amendments was closing because it is an "urgent" issue, after the Supreme Court has adopted, in his view, the "unacceptable" decision to "deprive hundreds of thousands of Spaniards of a fundamental right."
After emphasizing that "the right to vote in our country has only been deprived during dictatorships" and expressing his doubts about the constitutionality of the high court's resolution, Santiago indicated that with their amendment they seek to "resolve the legal doubts" that the magistrates may have.
In his opinion, the Supreme Court "is not clear" whether those who left Spain "fleeing from Francoism after the war" did so "for political reasons" and "can be considered exiles."
That is precisely the presumption stated in the instruction issued by the Ministry of Justice to apply the "grandchildren's law," which considers as exiles all those who "left Spain between July 18, 1936, and December 31, 1955."
Santiago criticized that the court does not find that instruction "sufficient," "despite being identical" to the one applied after the Historical Memory Law of 2007 without any jurisdictional body questioning its validity at that time.
In order to prevent the Supreme Court from "having doubts" about the solidity of this presumption "considering a certain legal rank," Sumar has opted to incorporate it directly into the Law of Democratic Memory through the amendment registered to the aforementioned educational law. "It is going to have the highest legal rank and as such the Supreme Court has to comply with the law," he emphasized.
The influence of the "party of the togas"
Furthermore, Santiago has lamented that from certain sectors of the judicial career "really inexplicable resolutions" like that of the Supreme Court are being issued "constantly." "There is a sector of the judiciary, fortunately not the majority but with a lot of influence" that the public identifies as the "party of the togas," he pointed out.
In his opinion, these internal currents contribute to "a degradation of the public service of Justice, which moves forward day by day thanks to the effort of thousands of judges and other officials and public servants, not always with all the necessary resources for it to function well."