Their reports supported Casero’s vote on the labor reform, the ‘coletillas’ when swearing in the Constitution and removing Rodríguez’s seat
MADRID, 20 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The general secretary of Congress and senior lawyer of the Cortes Generales, Carlos Gutierrez Vicén, has conveyed to the president of the Chamber, Francina Armengol, his intention to leave the position he has held for almost ten years, with two presidents of the PP and two of the PSOE. With her reports, she endorsed decisions such as the inadmissibility of the amnesty law for the Catalan independentists, the withdrawal of Alberto Rodríguez ( Podemos ) from his seat, or the validity of Alberto Casero’s erroneous vote on the labor reform.
Gutiérrez Vicén, who ascended to this position in 2014, when Jesús Posada was president and with an absolute majority of the PP, remained in the short term with the socialist Patxi López in 2016, later repeated with the ‘popular’ Ana Pastor and was ratified twice by Meritxell Batet, in 2019 and 2020.
According to what parliamentary sources informed Europa Press, Gutiérrez Vicén had already informed Batet of his intention to leave office at the end of the last legislature, and he later made it known to Armengol, who asked him for two months to start the legislature. As things stand, it is estimated that the replacement will take place soon, before the end of the year.
The General Secretariat, under the superior authority of the president and the Board, encompasses the different administrative and technical services of the Chamber performed by officials and constitutes the Administration of the Congress of Deputies. It offers assistance, support and legal, technical and administrative advice to the bodies of the Chamber, through the officials that comprise it.
The appointment of the secretary general must be approved by the Board of the Chamber at the proposal of its president, who in the coming weeks will have to choose between the lawyers of the Cortes Generales, whether from the Congress or the Senate, as long as they have more than five years of effective services. Once replaced, Gutiérrez Vicén will be assigned to a parliamentary commission or another senior official position, as has happened with his predecessors Manuel Alba Navarro and Piedad García Escudero.
Throughout these almost ten years in office, Gutierrez Vicén’s legal reports have been requested on numerous occasions and for different matters. Aside from the opposition competition process for the RTVE board that Congress designed under the Presidency of Ana Pastor, the most notable controversies came with the stage of Meritxell Batet, whom he supported on issues such as the closure of Congress in a pandemic, the ‘tailtags’ from the deputies when swearing in the Constitution, the telematic vote due to a landlord’s error in the labor reform, issues that ended up in the Constitutional Court.
Precisely these days the Court of Guarantees is examining the case of the removal of Podemos leader Alberto Rodríguez from his seat after being sentenced to disqualification by the Supreme Court. Although in a first report the lawyers maintained that the sentence should not have extra-criminal effects, that is, on the status of ‘purple’ deputy, because the Supreme Court had replaced the prison sentence with a fine of 540 euros, after a clarification with The president of the High Court endorsed Batet’s decision to withdraw the record by applying the supervening ineligibility.
And these days his report on the Amnesty Law presented in 2021 by the Catalan independentists has returned to the foreground to exonerate all those prosecuted for the 2014 sovereignty consultation and the illegal referendum of 2017. The lawyers concluded that this initiative could not be admitted for processing by assuming a general pardon that “would enter into a clear and obvious contradiction” with the Constitution, a criterion that Batet and the PSOE adopted in those days. Now the amnesty is one of the conditions for ERC and Junts to support the investiture of Pedro Sánchez.