The Plenary of the Constitutional Court has dismissed the amparo appeal filed by the former presidents of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont and the former Minister Toni Comín for which they questioned the decision of the Central Electoral Board (JEC), judicially ratified, not to include them in the list of elected Members communicated to the European Parliament.
The reason given by the JEC for rejecting the credentials for them to be MEPs is that they did not go before the body in person to abide by the Constitution after the elections held on May 26, 2019.
The Constitutional Court, under the presentation of Judge Cándido Conde-Pumpido, has taken into consideration that, eleven months before the application for amparo was filed, in January 2020, the European Parliament accepted their election as European deputies with retroactive effect to from July 2, 2019 and.
Therefore, in his opinion, from that date "both were authorized to assume their functions, to exercise their representative mandate and to occupy their seats, fully exercising since then the rights corresponding to the representative position for which they were elected."
Therefore, for the plenary session, this circumstance, subsequent to the contested JEC agreements, shows that, even before resorting to the amparo process, by an act of public power, the appellants obtained de facto the extra-procedural satisfaction of their claims of reestablishment or preservation of the fundamental rights denounced, “so that their eventual injury does not survive”.
The Court recalls in its resolution that the amparo procedural channel is not suitable for ruling on "purely declaratory claims" unrelated to a real and effective injury to the rights invoked.
The exposed circumstance has led to assess the extinction of the object of the main claim for amparo, and all its derivatives, which justifies the dismissal of the claims made.
Recently, the JEC has responded to a request from the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, in which she clarifies that Puigdemont, and three other Catalan MEPs, with Spanish laws in hand, do not have the minutes because they did not personally attend Madrid to abide by the Constitution.
The JEC responds to Metsola that this body duly communicated to the European Parliament the list of elected deputies who meet the conditions to acquire the full status of deputies to Parliament. "In the only four cases in which the credential could not be issued, the reason has been the will of the four affected not to meet the requirements without the JEC being able to suppress that voluntary omission," the text states.
