The legal services of Spain's Congress of Deputies have given the green light to the amnesty law proposal that will be voted on this Tuesday in the lower house's Bureau. The report by the lawyers argues that the text has no "defects of form" that make it impossible for it to be admitted for processing before the political parties debate it. Thus, with the majority held in the procedural Bureau by PSOE and Sumar, the organ is set to authorize the parliamentary processing of the bill that made it possible for Pedro Sánchez to be invested as new prime minister last week.
The report from the legal secretary of the Congress makes use of Constitutional Court jurisprudence to note that the procedure of classification and admission for processing of legislative initiatives from the Bureau "is not configured as a prior control over constitutionality". Therefore, the congressional lawyers write, the fact of rejecting the admission for processing of a parliamentary bill "is exceptional" and can only occur when the initiative does not have the "required formal elements", when the content of the text is "tainted by a blatant and obvious unconstitutionality" and when the admission for processing does not constitute a "manifest breach of what was decided by the Constitutional Court".
Nevertheless, in the conclusions of the report, the lawyers also recall the amnesty law proposal registered in 2021 by the pro-independence parties, which the Bureau did reject. On that occasion, they adduce, they understood that it entered "in stark contradiction with the prohibition of granting general pardons", something that does not happen with the bill presented by the PSOE, which has "elements that differentiate it".
The jurists for the Spanish lower house do, however, open the door for the Constitutional Court to issue an interpretation on the mechanism of an amnesty, a doctrine that "has not yet been written". The legal resolution states that "there are other possible reasons for unconstitutionality identified through the doctrine", although they add that, to analyse them, "it would be necessary to have the doctrine of the Constitutional Court". Thus, they underline that such breaches "would not derive from a direct reading of any precept of the constitution, but from an interpretation of those precepts applied to the mechanism of the amnesty that the Constitutional Court would have to rule on".
In the final conclusion of their report, the legal services resolve: "There do not seem to be sufficient parameters or elements in the Constitution or constitutional jurisprudence to determine if there is an obvious and flagrant contradiction with the Constitution."
The Bureau of Congress, with a majority held by the PSOE and Sumar, meets this Tuesday at 10am to decide whether or not to approve the bill for processing and, in view of the facts, it seems set to begin its parliamentary processing. It will be the beginning of a long road for a text that has the opposition of the right and the extreme right, and of judicial bodies such as the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ).