In October 1981, the magistrates of the recently created Constitutional Court received an appeal signed by Antonio Tejero, who a few months earlier had tried to take Congress by assault at gunpoint. In his letter, the civil guard asked to remove a magistrate because he had defined the coup attempt as “a tremendous attack on the Constitution” and that denoted a “manifest enmity” with him. That dayIn its first year of life, the Constitutional Court said that challenges and requests to remove magistrates had to be based on “concrete facts” and not on simple allegations. More than three decades later, the guarantee court still does not have its own law that regulates abstentions and the success of a challenge depends, to a large extent, on the person affected deciding to withdraw.
