The plenary session of Spain's Constitutional Court has this Wednesday suspended the reform to the Catalan Presidency law which would allow the investiture of the leader of Junts per Catalunya, Carles Puigdemont, at a distance. The court, shortly after 7pm this evening, unanimously accepted to consider an appeal from the Spanish government presented after an extraordinary cabinet meeting this morning. As a government appeal, in accordance with the Constitution, the law is automatically suspended for five months whilst the court reaches its verdict, a period which can be extended.
The appeal, drafted by the state's legal services argues that the precepts supporting an investiture without the candidate physically present in the chamber are clearly unconstitutional and warn that the change in the law "changes the rules of the game of parliamentary life at an essential moment" and "arbitrarily", to suit a "specific case", an allusion to Puigdemont.
The Spanish government also asked the court to personally warn the Parliament's speaker, Roger Torrent, and the other members of the Parliament's governing Bureau of their "duty to prevent or paralyse any initiative which means to ignore or avoid the agreed suspension". As stated by the government's spokesperson, Iñigo Méndez de Vigo, if they don't do so, the deputies could be committing the "crime of disobedience".
It asked the court to order them to abstain from "starting, processing, announcing or issuing, in the areas of their respective powers, any agreement or act with a view to the execution of the previsions contained in the contested precepts, warning of the extreme invalidity of the acts they might carry out and of the eventual liability, including criminal [liability], they could fall into if they don't fulfil this requirement".
Secondly, the Spanish government asked the Constitutional Court to prevent bodies of the Catalan government from meeting abroad, "or by means of telecommunications". Finally, Rajoy's government challenged the reform for having been passed in a single reading.