Political armor-plating

The appointments announced on Friday to replace four of the 12 judges who make up the Constitutional Court have not only restored a conservative majority in the institution, but also accentuated the political dependency of some of its members.

The singularity of the situation is that the court will have to rule on appeals of far-reaching importance, from the abortion law approved by the Socialist government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to the sovereignty aspirations of the Catalan government. Other major issues it will have to decide upon include the spending cuts introduced by the government, the tax amnesty, the one-euro charge on medical prescriptions, the proposed privatization of the Madrid regional health system and whether or not to release from jail Arnaldo Otegi, the secretary general of the left-wing nationalist Basque political group Sortu. All of these issues merit a court that enjoys respect rather than one characterized by serious deficiencies regarding the independence of its members.

One of these members stands out. Enrique López is a jurist with clear and unmistakable hardline ideological leanings. The now ruling conservative Popular Party has been trying for years to get him appointed to the Constitutional Court by dint of the quotas afforded to the group by force of its representation in the lower house and the Senate, and having failed to do so — principally because of the veto of the now opposition Socialist Party — the Cabinet on Friday succeeded in its intent by availing itself of its own quota.

The other appointment decreed by the government on Friday was Pedro González-Trevijano, a professional with fewer partisan trappings. At the same time, the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), the country’s legal watchdog, named two other people to make up the remaining positions in the court: the conservative Santiago Martínez Vares and the progressive Juan Antonio Xiol.

The conservative shift in the make-up of the court follows others in the opposite direction. It is clear that the battle to avoid the Constitutional Court becoming an extension of politics by other means has long since been lost and the distance of this outcome from those of the aspirations of constitutional actors is patent. The culture of consensus and institutional loyality has succumbed to partisan interests.

The tardiness of the law

To this must be added the anomalous time taken by the court to arrive at its decisions: for example, the seven years it took to rule on the constitutionality of the law on same-sex marriages, compared with the month it took the comparable body in France to issue its verdict on the same matter. And that’s not to mention the almost four years it need to reach its ruling on the Catalan Statute accompanied by the wave of grievances that decision unleashed when an institutional status quo on the issue had already been forged.

In the absence of political will to rectify this aberrant situation, it behoves the members of the Constitutional Court to act with a sense of responsibility. The matters they have at hand are of far too sensitive a nature for them to be summarily dispatched in one way or the other. Room must be left for constructive consideration to prevail in order to arrive at the best possible interpretation of the law among all others by trying to avoid politically colored considerations.