Tenerife
The Governing Council of the Canary Islands is meeting on Monday in what is being hailed as a “turning point in the management of the pandemic in the Archipelago”. They believe they have found a formula that will bypass any ruling from the TSJC and enable them to impose stronger restrictions in the islands to see out the end of the pandemic.
By means of a decree-law that will be debated in the meeting, the Regional Government intends to regulate the norms of prevention of contagion of COVID-19; a formula that closes the door for the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) to overturn, as it has done previously, including the implementation of measures such as a curfew or the requirement of the Covid Certificate, as announced by the president, Ángel Víctor Torres, himself yesterday.
The decree-law will come into force after being given the green light from the Governing Council, and will then need be ratified by Parliament, which although it has the possibility of revoking it, the current pact, constituted by PSOE, NC, Podemos and ASG, constitutes a majority in favour of new measures.
Once this procedure has been carried out, only the Spanish President, Pedro Sanchez, and not the central government, is qualified to go to the Constitutional Court of Spain (TC) under very specific assumptions to contest it. Another empowered participant is the Ombudsman, who can oppose it if he feels that the initiative violates the fundamental rights of citizens. Thirdly, another autonomous community that feels affected by them could try to overturn the measures, which would not happen as we are islands. And ultimately, a joint lawsuit filed by 50 national deputies or senators is the last resort.
However, it should be noted that the terms managed by the Constitutional Court would leave their opposal in litigation for several years. That is why there is a last option, and that is for Pedro Sánchez to invoke article 161.2 of the Magna Carta, according to which it would be doubtful that the decree of the Canary Government could be suspended due to its status as law.
All of these are plausible scenarios from a legal point of view, but if they occurred would suppose an unprecedented situation in the history of our democracy, although it is no less remarkable that the judgments of the Supreme Court in Spain will already appear in the history books, both due to the nature of the decisions and their consequences and because of the context in which they have occurred throughout the country: a global coronavirus epidemic.
So, what does this mean for us? Basically that if the Government does this the way they want to, they will have more ‘tools’, i.e. restrictions, at their disposal to reform the traffic light/alert levels system and impose closing times, curfew, capacity limitations, use of Covid Certificate, and so on if they wish. Watch this space!
