Constitutional Court: Role in Upholding Spanish Law
**Interpretation of the Constitution**
“The Constitutional Court is the supreme interpreter of the Constitution, not a legislator, and it can only be asked to pronounce on whether or not provisions accord with the Constitution.” (Constitutional Court Judgment 5/1981, of 13 February 1981, Legal Grounds 6).
“The law, as the emanation of the popular will, can in principle only be repealed or modified by the representatives of that will, and it is only for the case in which the legal provision infringes the Constitution that this Court has been granted the power to annul it. This power can only be used, nevertheless, when so required by very serious and well-founded reasons; when a constitutional organ or substantial part thereof affirms the existence of such infringement, or when, if that infringement has not been declared, a judicial organ were to find itself in a situation of violating the Constitution because, being subject to the rule of law (section 117.1 of the Constitution), it lacks the authority not to apply it even though it considers it to be contrary to a higher rule, but earlier in time. When these well-founded and serious reasons do not exist, then respect for the legislator requires that this Court should refrain from making any higher pronouncement.” (Constitutional Court Judgment 17/1981, of 1 June 1981, Legal Grounds 4).
“The Constitution is a framework of coincidences sufficiently broad so that political options of a very different hue can fit inside it. The task of interpreting the Constitution does not necessarily consist of blocking the way to options or variants imposing one of them in an authoritarian way. This conclusion will have to be arrived at only when the unequivocal nature of the interpretation is imposed by the set of interpretive criteria. We mean to say that political options and those of government are not previously programmed once and for all in such a way that all that can be done hereafter is to develop that prior programme.” (Constitutional Court Judgment 11/1981, of 8 April 1981, Legal Grounds 7).
The Supremacy of the Constitution
The supremacy of the Constitution is therefore indisputable in the internal order:
“[…] the Constitution, far from being a mere catalogue of principles that are not immediately binding and not immediately to be complied with until they become the object of development by legal channels, is a juridical rule, the supreme rule of our legal code, and as such the citizens and all the public authorities, and so to therefore all the Judges and Magistrates making up the judiciary, are subject to it (sections 9.1 and 117.1 of the Constitution).” (Constitutional Court Judgment 16/1982, of 28 April 1982, Legal Grounds 1).
EU Law vs. the Spanish Constitution
“That the Constitution is the supreme rule of the Spanish legal code is a question which, though not expressly stated in any of its provisions, undoubtedly derives from the wording of a great many of them, among others its sections 1.2, 9.1, 95, 161, 163, 167, 168 and repealing provision, and is consubstantial to its condition of fundamental rule; supremacy or higher rank of the Constitution with regard to any other rule, and specifically towards international treaties, which we affirm in Declaration 1/1992 (Legal Grounds 1). So, the proclamation of the primacy of the Law of the Union by section I-6 of the Treaty does not contradict the supremacy of the Constitution.” (Decree of the Constitutional Court 1/2004, of 13 December 2004, Legal Grounds 4).
The Constitution as a Systematic Whole
“[…] the Constitution is not the sum and aggregate of a multiplicity of unconnected mandates, but rather it is precisely the fundamental juridical order of the political community, governed and directed in turn by the proclamation of its section 1, in its paragraph 1, on the basis of which a coherent system has to result in which all its contents find the space and efficacy which the Constitution making power wished to grant them.
[…] the constitutional system is outside of any hierarchised conception, in a way that is more or less latent, among its ‘dogmatic’ and ‘organic’ contents.
Fundamental rights and democratic structure are both expressions and support of the same and sole model of political community which, since its origins, is represented by the Constitution.” (Constitutional Court Judgment 206/1992, of 27 November 1993, Legal Grounds 3).