Spain’s government has boasted that it has a report certifying the constitutionality of its planned amnesty for Catalan separatists but has yet to produce the report to the public.
The planned amnesty, which would pardon politicians who took part in the illegal 2017 independence referendum in Catalonia, has been at the center of a bitter national controversy since Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez returned to power in November. Separatist parties demanded the measure in return for propping up Sánchez’s minority government.
Last week, the opposition center-right Partido Popular announced that it had a report drafted by the three lawyers assigned to the Congressional Justice Commission, questioning whether the government’s planned amnesty is compatible with the Spanish constitution.
Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister María Jesús Montero countered with the claim that the Executive has other reports prepared by “jurists with at least the same prestige that others have” verifying the constitutionality of the move. She did not, though, provide any names and the government has not released any of the supposed reports to journalists, despite their requests.
Spain’s constitution does not contain any provisions for a region to hold an independence referendum. Many of the organisers of the 2017 Catalonia referendum were therefore convicted of sedition. Some fled the country, including the region’s president at the time, Carles Puigdemont, who has lived in exile in Belgium ever since.
Many politicians and lawyers now question whether a law pardoning the organisers would itself be constitutional.
There have even been suspicions about the president of the Constitutional Court himself, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, since, for months, neither the government nor Conde-Pumpido’s circle have denied reports that he advised the socialists in the drafting of their amnesty law proposal.
While boasting of the support of legal experts, various government ministers have continued to state that, in any case, the final word on the law’s constitutionality belongs to the Constitutional Court, demonstrating confidence that they will have the support of the court when the day comes.
Indeed the socialists hawk their arguments in favor of the amnesty anywhere they can, including a party convention over the weekend in which high ranking members proclaimed that the amnesty, which will cover crimes as wide as vandalism and embezzlement, is a “fundamental tool” for the “total reunion” between Catalonia and the rest of Spain and that it is “fully constitutional.”