Despite some changes made by Unidas Podemos and the nationalist and pro-independence parties, the legal advisors to Spain's Congress of Deputies still refuse to accept a commission of inquiry into the dubious dealings of former king Juan Carlos I. As reported by television network Antena 3 and confirmed to ElNacional.cat by parliamentary sources, the parliamentary lawyers consider that it would be legally incorrect for the petition to be accepted by the Bureau, the procedural committee of MPs which decides the Spanish parliamentary agenda. This, despite the fact that the MPs behind the initiative restricted the proposed investigation to the period after 2014, when Juan Carlos abdicated as Spanish king and head of state and therefore lost his inviolability.
Last week, a total of nine parliamentary parties - Unidas Podemos, ERC, JxCat, the CUP, the PNB, Bildu, Més País, Compromís and the BNG - made a new petition for a commission of inquiry, different from previous proposals. To try and obtain the lawyers' backing, the new request asked for a investigation into only the period from 2014 onward, when Juan Carlos I ceased to be head of state. The previous three requests had not placed such a time restriction, and all three were rejected by a majority of the Bureau, with the votes of the governing Socialists (PSOE), and the two main right-wing opposition parties, the PP and Vox, which adhered to the criteria of the chamber's legal services.
In their new report, the lawyers of Congress state that the proposal cannot be admitted for consideration because the royal prerogatives of inviolability and non-accountability, contained in article 56.3 of the Spanish Constitution "are absolute, cover the whole period of being head of state and have permanent legal effects". Furthermore, they emphasize that "this application refers to issues which, even if they may have had projection in a later period, relate without any solution of continuity to the period of time in which His Majesty Juan Carlos I was the head of state of Spain and arise from the very fact of his occupancy of the head of state position".
The Bureau of the Spanish lower house meets on Tuesday morning to consider the matter. It is expected that this proposal will follow the same path as the previous ones. All the requests for a commission of inquiry into the monarchy registered with the Bureau in recent months, even with support from Unidas Podemos, the junior partner in the coalition government, have ended up being swiftly rejected by the Bureau majority held by the PSOE, the PP and Vox.