The Central Electoral Board (JEC) has agreed this Monday to assume the order issued by the Supreme Court in its precautionary measures regarding the provision of the Democratic Memory Law known as the grandchildren law and has commissioned reports from the Electoral Census Office and consular registries to, among other measures, verify the connection with exile of the people who have obtained or are in the process of obtaining Spanish nationality through this route.
The Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the high court decided last week to grant the requests of Vox and Iustitia Europa and provisionally suspended – until it issues a ruling – the vote for people already registered in the Electoral Census of Absent Residents (CERA) who obtained nationality through the aforementioned law, as well as new registrations in it, unless they prove that they descend from Spanish exiles.
In this context, the high court ordered the JEC to immediately request from the consular registry officials, who are tasked with “issuing a certificate” proving that those benefiting from the so-called ‘grandchildren law’ were born “outside Spain, of a father or mother, grandfather or grandmother” originally Spanish who suffered “exile for political, ideological or belief reasons or sexual identity orientation” and who “had lost or renounced nationality”.
Last July, the JEC already ruled on various requests regarding the legality of the instruction issued in 2022 by the then Director General of Legal Security and Public Faith, Sofía Puente, to determine how the grandchildren law should be applied.
The arbitration body then agreed to request a specific instruction from the Electoral Census Office on the matter and warned that the determination of the electoral municipality in which each beneficiary of the law is registered must be “sufficiently justified” if it does not correspond to their last residence in Spain.
At that time, the JEC rejected the precautionary suspension of the CERA preparation procedure requested by, among others, Vox, as it did not consider itself competent to rule on laws and regulatory provisions of their development.
In any case, it had already started work by asking the Census Office to inform it about the application of the rule governing the updating of the census, especially regarding whether explanatory statements of voters requesting registration in a municipality different from their last residence in Spain are examined.
