The European Comission does not see any collision of the bill of law amnesty with community principles and standards, the financial interests of the EU will be saved and lawfare cases will be excludedwith which he understands that it is a domestic matter whose evaluation will be up to the competent national authorities, according to the first impressions of their services, although the text is still under study.
This is what Europa Press is informed by community sources who indicate that the main concerns of the Community Executive regarding the future amnesty law were its impact on the financial interests of the EU and on the rule of law, specifically in the principle of separation of powers due to the possibility that it covered the so-called ‘lawfare’ or ‘judicial war’ cases.
But they explain that, after that first look at the text recorded last Monday in the Congress of Deputies by the PSOE, Those two concerns have been dispelled. because both issues are outside the bill. In any case, they clarify, the text is now being analyzed in depth by legal services before offering a formal opinion.
Thus, article 2 of the text details the cases that are excluded from the future amnesty, including among them “crimes that affect the financial interests of the European Union.”
Regarding ‘lawfare’, although it is not expressly mentioned, limits the amnestied acts to those “directly or indirectly linked to the so-called independence process”pointing out crimes of usurpation of public functions, embezzlement, disobedience, public disorders or prevarication, which leaves out others such as money laundering, criminal organization or illicit association, document falsification or against the Public Treasury.
If there had been any reference to ‘lawfare’ in the bill, the European Commission would have had to act, say the aforementioned sources. But since it is only included in an agreement between political parties, the one signed by the PSOE and Junts last Thursday, it remains out of reach of Brussels.
In this sense, they point out that The community executive cannot become a “political actor” in the Member States. A different thing, they warn, is that this political agreement that includes the ‘lawfare’ has a legislative development.
With everything, For Brussels, the proposed law, in its current state, is a national matter, whose control will correspond to the competent authorities, starting with Parliament, which must process and approve it, and ending with the Constitutional Court (TC), which will have the final say on its legality.
Along the same lines, the sources consulted point out that the political motivations for approving an amnesty law, whether those expressed in the statement of reasons – which justifies it by the need to reduce “institutional tension” – or the support of the political forces independence supporters to the investiture of Pedro Sánchez as President of the Government, are not relevant for the European Commission because it is the national bodies that must evaluate them.
Furthermore, they rule out any parallelism with the case of Romaniawhen Brussels warned that it would act if an amnesty law drafted by the ruling Social Democratic Party was approved to forgive its then leader, Liviu Dragnea, who had been sentenced to three and a half years in prison for abuse of power, although he had accumulated another conviction for electoral fraud.
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The sources emphasize that In the Romanian case it was an amnesty law designed to directly benefit the leader of the ruling party that drove her, a situation that does not occur on the Spanish stage. Added to this is that the amnesty law never saw the light of day.
In any case, they emphasize that to activate article 7 of the EU Treaty, which allows the suspension of rights as a Member State, it must be a systematic failure of the EU principles and rules, so a single infraction would not be enough to put it in motion, no matter how serious it was.