The PP will veto the amnesty and return it to Congress to be definitively approved by the Government and its partners
MADRID, 5 May. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The processing of the Amnesty Law in the Senate is now entering its final stretch after almost two months and will take its penultimate step this Monday with the presentation meeting. From there, the majority of the PP will decide whether to veto it and return it to Congress in the plenary session on Wednesday, May 8, or leave it for the session on May 14, after the Catalan elections on May 12.
In any case, the absolute majority that the PP has in the Senate will approve the veto – amendment to the entirety – of this Amnesty Law, so it will have to return to Congress for the Government and its parliamentary partners to lift this veto. and is definitively approved by the General Cortes.
The amnesty law proposal, which the PSOE agreed with the independence groups for the inauguration of Pedro Sánchez, reached the Senate on March 15 with the urgent procedure after being approved by Congress.
However, the reform of the Senate Regulations promoted by the PP gave the power to the Upper House Table to eliminate the urgency of this rule, so that the amnesty has passed through the Senate as an ordinary text.
In this way, the maximum processing time for the Amnesty Law in the Senate is two months, like any ordinary norm, so the Upper House has until May 16 to vote on this norm in the Plenary.
In this context, the PP has called a plenary session for Tuesday, May 14 – which was not initially planned in the session calendar – to leave the door open to vote on the Amnesty Law that day, just after the Catalan elections. the 12th of May.
Of course, ‘popular’ sources explain that the presentation to prepare the amnesty report – the penultimate step – will meet this Monday, May 6, and from there the debate and vote on the bill could take place. in the plenary session of May 8 and that of the 14th, which has been expressly enabled in case the case arises.
Since the entry of the amnesty in the Senate, the Senate Board, with a ‘popular’ majority, has requested several reports to give an opinion on this rule from different bodies such as the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), the Fiscal Council, the Commission of Venice or the Chamber’s own lawyers.
The first to issue their report were the lawyers of the Senate, who concluded that the proposed amnesty law is unconstitutional in a harsh text in which they criticize the processing and substance of this norm, which they call “disguised reform of the Constitution”.
Of course, the PP also requested a report to see the consequences of not processing this law in the Senate, as Vox insisted, although the Chamber’s lawyers maintain that it had to be processed, although they opened the door to a conflict of powers with the Congress.
In this context, the Senate approved this unprecedented institutional clash with the Congress promoted by the PP in which it was formally requested that the Chamber chaired by the socialist Francina Armengol withdraw the amnesty law proposal, understanding that it was a covert reform of the Constitution. .
This institutional clash was referred to the Congress of Deputies, which responded to the Senate that it was not going to withdraw the amnesty law proposal. In this way, the PP now has the power to raise this conflict of powers to the Constitutional Court, although everything seems to indicate that it will go to this body when the amnesty law is definitively approved.
For its part, the Venice Commission report does not see a conflict of separation of powers with the Amnesty Law if it is on Thursdays that order the measures that will benefit those protected by the law. However, he considers that the rule should have been approved by a qualified majority, larger than the absolute one, and criticizes the emergency procedure that the law has followed in Congress.
Of course, in its report, the body that is part of the Council of Europe does not assess whether the law is constitutional or not and points out that it is a decision that must be made by the Constitutional Court. It also does not rule on whether the rule is compatible with European Union law, and leaves it in the hands of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU).
Likewise, the Senate entrusted the General Commission of the Autonomous Communities with a report on the regional content of the amnesty law, which led to a debate in this forum with several regional presidents of the PP and the Catalan president, Pere Aragonès, on this norm.
Regarding the CGPJ report, this body has not yet commented, while the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, has twice refused to produce reports on this norm.
The Senate created an ‘ad hoc’ commission to process this amnesty law and different legal experts proposed by the groups have paraded between May 16 and 30 to give their opinion on the bill.
