The controversy surrounding Barcelona City Council’s regulation governing popular consultations in the Catalan capital is set to enter a new judicial chapter. The Supreme Court will deliver the definitive ruling on the norm, as confirmed by two recent judicial orders accessed by EL PERIÓDICO, in which the high court accepted two appeals filed by the City Council against judgments by the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) that partially annulled the regulation. These two resolutions addressed challenges brought by the Association of Constitutionalist Jurists for Liberties and the Chamber of Infrastructures, Equipment, and Public Services.
Supreme Court to Examine Second Version of Regulation
What the Supreme Court will examine is, in fact, the second version of Barcelona’s Participation Regulation. The first version-both approved during Ada Colau’s mayoral tenure, in October 2017 and May 2022-was also declared null by the TSJC. However, on that occasion, the Supreme Court did not admit the municipal appeal. This time, it has, as the judges understand that the controversy over the norm “affects a large number of situations due to the impact that the regulation of citizen consultations at the municipal level may have.” The Supreme Court even emphasizes the case as a precedent that could affect “all existing city councils in Spain.”
City Council Defends Municipal Autonomy
The City Council, now led by Mayor Jaume Collboni, argues before the highest judicial instance that its norm “met the conditions of certainty and predictability, without confusion or omissions,” and that the TSJC’s setback causes a “detriment to municipal autonomy.” Specifically, the Catalan administration understands that annulling the norm is tantamount to going against city councils “as immediate channels for participation in public affairs.”
The City Council’s arguments connect with the reasons why the TSJC annulled certain articles of the regulation and on which, consequently, the Supreme Court must rule. The most relevant discussion is whether the regulation respects the non-binding nature of the consultations it regulates. For example, because the two entities that challenged it understand that the definition of the vote made by the norm-“free, direct, secret, and equal”-is contrary to the merely consultative nature of citizen questions.
At the time, Councilor Marc Serra (Comuns), who was part of the municipal government that pushed through the regulation, stated that “it is not Colau’s regulation: it had broad political and social consensus; the first draft was approved during Xavier Trias’s mandate.” The councilor attributed the motivation for the appeals against the norm to “preventing a consultation on the remunicipalization of water” in Barcelona, amidst the ‘water war’ between Colau’s government and the company Aigües de Barcelona. The first version of the regulation was the subject of 40 appeals that led to a dozen lawsuits.
Prohibited Matters for Consultations and Signature Requirements
The thesis that the regulation attributes a binding character to the consultations is reinforced, the TSJC endorsed, by the fact that it foresees the faculty of Barcelona’s municipal groups to “state whether they will accept the results and their consequences at the time of the approval of the consultation.” Furthermore, the TSJC also questioned whether it is clear that consultations can only relate to matters of strictly local competence: the City Council refers to state and regional regulations, and the TSJC considers it “confusing and generic,” criticizing that it implies “a high level of insecurity.”
A final debated issue is that of the matters on which popular consultations are prohibited. Specifically, there are two: “Those for which some type of contract signed by the Barcelona City Council is being executed, in case the holding of the consultation could cause damages whose repair is difficult or impossible”; and, on the other hand, “when the City Council is processing a contracting file on the subject of the consultation, in case the holding of the consultation could cause damages whose repair is difficult or impossible.”
While the City Council defends these prohibitions, the TSJC judgments are critical: “It is an unjustified and incomprehensible exclusion, given that these are non-binding citizen consultations,” argued the court, “and therefore it understands that the principle of legal certainty is infringed,” explains the Supreme Court. This regulation, which the Supreme Court will now analyze, was approved in May 2022 under the mandate of Ada Colau and established that at least 88,709 signatures were needed to promote a citizen consultation in Barcelona. The text is practically identical to that of 2017, which did not pass the TSJC’s filter, with the significant change of increasing the minimum required signatures from 15,000 to 88,709 to launch a popular initiative.
At the time, entities were already critical of the increase in the minimum number of signatures required to promote consultations. As they explained in this newspaper, the Council of Associations of Barcelona (CAB) pointed out that they could not even imagine how they could gather almost 90,000 if they already had difficulties in achieving 1,000. The Federation of Neighborhood Associations of Barcelona (FAVB) expressed a similar view: “To gather 88,709 signatures in three months, any organization would have to stop all its activity to focus on that, and even so, they might not succeed,” the federation lamented.
Source: elperiodico.com.cat
