The PP wants to urgently change the Constitutional Court law to punish Mas

The candidate for the Popular Party of Catalonia for the 27 September elections, Xavier García Albiol, and the spokesperson for the PP in the Spanish congress, Rafael Hernando, have announced that the party will put forward a modification of the Organic Law of the Spanish Constitutional Court to give this institution mechanisms to ensure that resolutions are fulfilled and to act against all people who breach them. Up to now, only ordinary justice had the power to do this. Albiol, who mentioned the president of the Government of Catalonia, Artur Mas, said that the reform would include fines and the suspension of political leaders who ignored the sentences passed by the court.

The PP wants to start up the reform in this legislature, taking advantage of its absolute majority and as part of its processing of the general budgets of the Spanish state. According to Albiol and Hernando, it will be passed by urgent means to give the Constitutional Court the capacity to sanction and suspend officials, leaders and authorities who fail to observe its resolutions.

Albiol: ‘The joke is over’

Xavier García Albiol said that the change in the law is ‘the guarantee that no one will breach the resolutions of the Constitutional Court any more’. ‘It is a very clear message to those who want to break Catalonia away from the rest of Spain that the joke is over’, he asserted.

He also stressed that it is the clearest evidence that ‘no one can proclaim the independence of Catalonia’ because it gives the CC resources so that ‘its resolutions and sentences might be carried out by the officials and the authorities’. ‘The Constitutional Court is also given the mechanisms to be able to act with respect to uncompliant people, authorities or officials’, he concluded.

Rafael Hernando said that with this proposal the Popular Party wishes to give the Constitutional Court ‘the necessary tools’ to execute sentences once the parties have been heard. ‘Some will have to bear in mind that their decisions will now be taken at a price’, he stressed.

The Catalan government qualifies the PP’s reformation of the Constitutional Court as repressive

The spokesperson of the Catalan government, Neus Munté, called the PP’s proposed reformation of the Spanish Constitutional Court an ‘electoral act’. Munté complained that the PP only considers ‘repression, threats and fear’ and said that this change is ‘unconstitutional’. She also took the chance to say that it is the Spanish state that has the ‘broken hand’ in ignoring CC sentences and answered Garcia Albiol by saying that ‘Catalonia is no joke’ and that the will to decide on its own future is not either.