The Supreme Court has agreed this Tuesday to suspend registrations in the Electoral Census of Absent Residents derived from the application of the grandchildren law. The Administrative Litigation Chamber of the High Court thus grants the precautionary measure requested by Iustitia Europa and Vox, who argued that the Government was preparing a “massive fraud” in the upcoming elections.
Read more PISA Report: Spain’s educational failure is a political failure
Both parties presented their arguments in a hearing held yesterday at the Supreme Court. Both the Prosecutor’s Office and the Government, through the State Attorney’s Office, had opposed the suspension.
The resolution agrees that the procedures provided for in the law should continue, but that the exercise of the right to vote for the newly registered should be suspended while the appeals against the legal reform are resolved. “The processing of the corresponding registration file will continue until its completion. Once said file is completed, registration in the aforementioned Census will be suspended until the judgment in this procedure is issued,” indicate the magistrates of the Fourth Section. In the case of those already registered, “the electoral effects of the registration in said Census will be suspended.”
In the development of the 2022 Democratic Memory Law, the Ministry of Justice established the presumption that those who had left Spain between 1936 and 1955 had gone into exile for political reasons. They could be granted nationality – and with it the right to register in the electoral census – without the need to documentarily prove that circumstance.
Now the Supreme Court suspends the application of that instruction approved in October 2022 by the Directorate General of Legal Security and Public Faith, then headed by Sofía Puente, sister of the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente.
The High Court does accept that those who have demonstrated with documents the condition of exiles of their predecessors maintain or gain their right to vote. The suspension “will not apply,” therefore, to those “who had suffered exile for political, ideological or belief reasons or sexual identity orientation and who had lost or renounced Spanish nationality, without applying the presumption.”
In the same resolution, the Administrative Litigation Chamber also requests data to verify the scope of the reform. It orders the Electoral Census Office to inform it of the number of cases processed, breaking down those that have adhered to the presumption ordered to be applied by the Ministry of Justice.
The precautionary measures have been adopted within the appeals filed against the refusal of the Central Electoral Board (JEC) to suspend the application of the grandchildren law. In its decision, the JEC considered that it was not competent to halt the application of the rule. What it did do was order the Electoral Census Office to prepare a report on the scope of the grandchildren law. This point is not only ratified by the Supreme Court, but the High Court adds that this report must be completed within a maximum of 15 days.
