Denounces the “indeterminacy” of the scope of application, which “harms the principle of legal certainty”
A second report from Congressional lawyers raises doubts about the constitutionality of the Amnesty Law being processed by the Chamber and sees indeterminacy in the scope of application that appears in the initiative registered by the PSOE.
The bill was the subject of a first report by the team of the general secretary of Congress and senior lawyer of the Cortes, Fernando Galindo, who saw doubts of constitutionality in the initiative agreed with the independentists, but not so “clear” as to veto its processing.
Now it is the lawyers of the Justice Commission, who worked with presidents of the PP – Piedad García Escudero was a senior lawyer with Luisa Fernanda Rudi and Isabel Revuelta was technical general secretary of Defense with Federico Trillo – who influence these doubts and they detail them, “even excluding that their eventual unconstitutionality is obvious and evident” and underlining “the fundamental consideration that in this case it must be the Constitutional Court that rules on the law approved by the Cortes Generales.”
At the outset, the report questions whether the 1977 amnesty could be the premise to deduce that this is a “legal figure permitted by the Constitution and open to the scope of decision of the legislator”, given that it is not among the powers of the Cortes. General Pardons and also the Magna Carta “expressly disallows” general pardons.
For this reason, it considers that “the initiative contained in this proposal raises doubts that it can have a place in the Constitution, so that it should be articulated through the constitutional reform procedure.”
Furthermore, he maintains that attributing to the Cortes a generic initiative to amnesty “would go beyond the nature of a singular law” that the PSOE defends in the explanatory statement and could invade the “jurisdictional power attributed by article 117.3 of the Constitution in exhaustive terms exclusively to the courts and tribunals”.
Understanding the bill as a “singular law”, the report from the legal services of Congress, to which Europa Press has had access, denounces the “indeterminacy” of the crimes included in the Amnesty Law, which could “injure the principle of legal certainty enshrined in article 9.3 of the Constitution”.
THEY DOUBT THAT THE APPLICATION OF THE AMNESTY CAN BE “UNIQUE”
In his opinion, this indeterminacy also extends to the “framework” of the acts susceptible to being amnestied and to the temporal scope of the law, which covers from January 2012 to the present.
“There is a lack of determination in the scope of application of the law, both in terms of the amnestied crimes and the period in which they were committed, which does not correspond with the exceptional nature of an extinction of responsibility or with the requirements of a law singular, which can affect the constitutional principle of legal certainty and hinder the unequivocal application of the law,” they conclude.
Furthermore, they highlight that “indeterminacy” exceeds the concept of singular law outlined by the Constitutional Court and could give rise to an “arbitrary delimitation” of the scope of application and, therefore, infringe the principle of equality. “The acceptance of a singular law is determined by the specificity of the assumptions” and if there is not “this essential specificity” the law “may not be protected by constitutional jurisprudence.”
CRIME OF EMBELESSMENT
He also questions the inclusion of the crime of embezzlement among those that may be subject to amnesty, since this “could compromise the harmonization and effectiveness” of European regulations against fraud and sees fit to exclude terrorism crimes because including them would contradict European directives. Precisely ERC and Junts, in their amendments, try to apply the amnesty to unsentenced terrorism crimes, something that the PSOE for the moment refuses to accept.
At other points in the report, the report warns of the consequences that the planned revocation of European arrest warrants could have for EU legislation and questions the lifting of the precautionary measures adopted regarding amnestied actions or omissions because they have doubts that the PSOE proposal is regulating a matter contained in the TC Law without reforming it.
