The decision of the Holiday Chamber of the Constitutional Court, with a conservative majority -unlike what happens in plenary session, with a progressive majority since January-, to reject without debate in plenary session an appeal for protection by the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont and his minister Toni Comín on the national arrest warrants that weigh on them has surprised locals and strangers and has triggered suspicions about the intentions of the judges in the midst of the negotiations for the investiture.
The order of the TC known yesterday contained a particular vote of the progressive magistrate Laura Díez, who warned that there was no urgency in resolving the issue. This Thursday, her plenary partner, the also progressive María Luisa Balaguer, has voiced the particular vote of her colleague. "I do not know what has encouraged these people to resolve a situation that is usually done by admitting proceedings and avocando," said the magistrate in an intervention on the Hoy por hoy de La Ser program.
Balaguer, who has recognized that the attitude of his colleagues is "unusual" but has wanted to emphasize that he does not intend to assess their intentions, has made it clear that since 2017 "all these issues", alluding to the cause of the process, have been have processed in full because, in his opinion, it is up to him "when there is an exceptional interest in matters of that contentiousness, importance and transcendence".
Balaguer has insisted that since then a "consensus" was reached in the TC that "we have respected" and has recalled that this unity was only broken, "of course justifying it a lot", on two occasions, one of them on the sentence of the Supreme Court process in 2019 in which she and Juan Antonio Xiol, also a progressive, made a dissenting vote. The other occasion was a concurring vote of themselves on a fine imposed in 2017 on the Republican Josep Maria Jové, then number two of Oriol Junqueras, and on the electoral trustees of the illegalized 1-O referendum.
"I think that a magistrate when faced with a legal problem must provide a legal solution," Balaguer warned, adding that "politicians must give a political response." "We must be as oblivious to politics as possible, it is what I always try to do," the magistrate has settled, implying that her colleagues, César Tolosa and Concepción Espejel, perhaps have not done so on this occasion.
Yesterday's order has been interpreted in various media as an attempt by the conservative sector of the court of constitutional guarantees to hinder the investiture process after the result of the 23-J elections that left Junts, Carles Puigdemont's party, as the key to the governance of Spain.
In any case, yesterday, the TC Prosecutor's Office already announced that it will appeal the order in September, which will force a debate in plenary session of the guarantee body which, since last January, has had a progressive majority. The Public Prosecutor's Office will act on the understanding, as Díaz recounts in his dissenting opinion, that there was no urgency that would lead the Holiday Chamber to resolve the request to suspend the national arrest warrant that the Supreme Court issued against Puigdemont and that he had appealed to exhaust the judicial channels to annul the arrest warrant in Spanish territory that weighs on him and Comín.
