Carles Puigdemont, in a Twitter image from April 6, 2021, in which he shows a card of the so-called “Republican Digital Identity”.
The Constitutional Court has closed in its plenary this week one of the most controversial chapters of the process and the illegal referendum of 1-O, by issuing a sentence that leaves sufficient control mechanisms in the hands of the State that would prevent possible attempts to put into effect a Catalan “digital republic” is marching, or that of any other autonomous community. The ruling dismisses an unconstitutionality appeal filed by the Parliament of Catalonia against various precepts of a royal decree approved by the Government in 2019 after the experiences of two years before, with the implementation of projects to disconnect Catalonia from the rest from Spain.
The Executive issued this regulation based on the need to adopt urgent measures “for reasons of public security in matters of digital administration, public sector contracting and telecommunications.” What the Government wanted was to prevent the Catalan administration from having the means to make it possible to exercise from outside Spain a supposed right to vote in consultations or referendums called unilaterally. Or that for initiatives of this type there were documents such as the Catalan DNI.
The questioned decree law left the door open for the state administration to fully assume the management of electronic communications services, always on an exceptional and transitory basis. The requirement for this type of action was to prove that it was dealing with situations that put collective security and public order, or national security itself, at risk. Before this, there have already been two Constitutional rulings with pronouncements favorable to the powers of the State in this matter, in response to appeals from the Generalitat and the Basque Government.
The judgment —for which Judge Laura Díez was the rapporteur—, dismisses the Catalan Parliament’s appeal because it considers that there was indeed “the extraordinary and urgent need to approve a royal decree-law and that the temporary prohibition of the use of identification based on distributed registry technologies does not go beyond the limits of state competence recognized in article 149.1.18 of the Constitution”. This precept confers on the State, among others, exclusive jurisdiction over “the bases of the legal regime of public administrations” and “the system of responsibility of all public administrations”.
The ruling also considers that there has been a partial loss of the object of the appeal in relation to some of the alleged violations of jurisdiction and also in relation to some infringements raised by the Parliament of Catalonia. Said loss of object is due to the subsequent approval of the General Communications Law, which introduced changes in the legislation, among other matters on the prior authorization of the general administration of the State in relation to the electronic signatures and seals that the autonomous community uses. for their relationship with citizens.
The Constitutional Court considers that the provision that established the intervention on all electronic communications networks and services for reasons of public order has also lost its purpose. Finally, the sentence addresses the possible violations of European law contained in the aforementioned decree-law. In this regard, the court maintains that the community legal system “is not in itself a direct canon of constitutionality”, therefore “the blemishes based on the alleged incompatibility with it are not admissible” in an appeal that questions the constitutional fit of the legislation state.
What affects the most is what happens closer. To not miss anything, subscribe.
subscribe
75% discount
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
