This week the Constitutional Court has rejected, with an almost unprecedented majority in recent years, the appeal that Vox filed against the euthanasia law approved in 2021. With nine votes in favor and two against, the highest interpreter of the Constitution has dismissed entirely a new attempt by the right to annul in the courts legal measures that suppose a recognition of new rights. The ruling endorsing the euthanasia law is added to others dictated by the Constitution in the same sense such as abortion, equal marriage or the extension of paternity leave.
The criminal offensive against the management of COVID is shipwrecked in the courts
Further
In the case of the norm that regulates euthanasia, the full sentence is yet to be known, but the arguments of the majority of the court overturn Vox’s allegations, both those that were expressed in their appeal and those who moved in public when affirming that this law is a “defeat of civilization” and a “victory of the culture of death”. The right to life of Article 15 of the Constitution, says the highest interpreter of that text, does not impose a “paradoxical duty to live.” He adds the court that “the absolutizing thesis of life is not compatible with the Constitution.”
The leaders of PP and Vox allege that their resources seek to protect a part of society that is left defenseless with the laws of the left. The resources, examined in detail, attack, however, the rights acquired in these laws by members of different groups. The PP tried to put an end to the law that regularized marriage between people of the same sex, approved during the Zapatero government. The appeal of the conservatives before the court ensured that the Law “disnaturalises marriage” and turns it into “a polysemic, blurred and available institution.”
The parity lists included in the Equality Law of 2007, two years later, altered “the Spanish electoral system”, defended the PP. The legislator, according to the conservatives, must be “neutral” with respect to “sex, race, age or religion”, being prohibited “all discrimination, positive or negative, based on such circumstances”. Regarding the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, Federico Trillo proclaimed in 2010, when presenting his party’s appeal against the law, that a woman’s decision to abort is “contrary to the right to life.”
Years late, but with the firmness of the Constitutional resolutions, the court rejects all these arguments. It has recently happened with the recourse to the abortion law, the oldest of those awaiting a response from the interpreter of the fundamental norm. Pending the final deliberation, the progressive majority of the guarantee court has chosen to reject that appeal presented by Trillo and deny that the right to abortion is, as denounced by the PP, a kind of carte blanche to threaten the right to life. Even the rejected presentation by the conservative Enrique Arnaldo distanced itself from most of the PP’s proposals.
Something similar has happened with the appeal that the Popular Party filed against the equality rule that, among other things, progressively equalized paternity leave to maternity leave. Where Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s party denounced that the urgent processing of the norm had been illegal, the majority of the plenary session understands that it was a procedure justified by the lack of progress in terms of equality since the entry into force of the 2007 norm, during Zapatero’s first legislature.
That 2007 law included aspects such as the joint electoral lists of the political parties and was also appealed, without success, by the Popular Party. 15 years ago the Constitutional rejected another appeal of the PP alleging that this measure is not discriminatory since it “exceeds the proportionality canon because it is its legitimate purpose.”
The biggest political and judicial failure of the PP before the Constitutional Court came in 2012. Spain was already recognized internationally as a pioneer in advancing the rights of homosexual people and reality was facing the appeal presented seven years earlier by the PP. In its ruling, the Constitutional Court ruled that allowing two homosexual people to marry does not affect the rights of families and neither does it affect the rights of children. The right to marriage was modified “without affecting its content” and without “undermining the right to marriage of heterosexual people,” the Constitution added. One of the votes that endorsed the gay marriage law was from the then president of the Constitutional Court, appointed at the proposal of the PP, Francisco Pérez de los Cobos.
Another example is the rule issued by the Government during the pandemic, which set limits on the evictions of vulnerable people and which, according to the Popular Party, meant a de facto legalization of the illegal occupation of houses. The court ruled that, far from being a carte blanche for ‘squatting’, the law had a “social interest purpose”, had a “minimum and temporary” impact on the owners and, in addition, could “be the object of economic compensation ”.
The Vox Resource Cascade
For its part, Vox has made the appeals filed before the Constitutional Court the spearhead of its opposition to the progressive government. The extreme right boasts of the number of appeals that it has already filed before the guarantee court: the last, against the reform of the Penal Code and the repeal of sedition, was number 46 according to the website of the party
Some of these appeals follow the line of seeking the annulment of regulations that have been deepened in recent years, for example, in terms of labor rights. This is the case with the appeal that the ultra-right filed against the Minimum Vital Income, against the Rider law and against the latest labor reform.
The Minimum Vital Income is a public benefit for people without basic income. The second of the cited laws put a stop to the abuse of the figure of the false self-employed by delivery companies such as Glovo, Deliveroo or Uber Eats. The labor reform is one of the instruments of the current Executive that has caused a plummeting of temporary contracts. They are resources that, for the moment, have passed the first filter of admission to processing and that are pending to enter the plenary calendar and be submitted to deliberation by the Constitutional Court.
Other far-right judicial initiatives are directed against the Democratic Memory Law, which, among other things, declares the right of victims to have the State take charge of exhumations. Also against the Zerolo law of Equal Treatment or the Rhodes law of comprehensive protection for children. For the moment the ultra-right has not appealed the Trans law – the PP has limited itself to promising its repeal if they reach the Government – but they did appeal the Canary Islands norm on transsexual people.
Vox’s latest judicial milestone before the guarantee court has ended in failure. The plenary session has decided to reject the appeal that the far-right party filed against the Government Education Law, known as the Celaá Law. “Today is the beginning of the end of a sectarian and exclusive law”, said the then deputy Macarena Olona.
