Some sixty public figures, the majority professors at some twenty universities in Spain or abroad, have signed a manifesto for a federal reform of the Spanish Constitution. The text (in Spanish), organised in Galicia, is entitled Renewing the constitutional pact and defends constitutional reform as a way to end the Catalan conflict.
The manifesto argues that after the "disastrous management of the Catalan crisis", Spain has to move ahead with a "federal political project". As such, the signatories propose "renewing the constitutional pact within a spirit of harmony, without humiliations, without victors or vanquished" and a "civilised solution to the argument Spain finds itself in, which recognises its diversity of identity".
They also say that the claims seen in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia and other areas of Spain, shouldn't be understood as "a threat to Spanish democracy, nor the unity of Spain, rather as legitimate aspirations of a sector of the public, freely expressed in a plural and democratic society which, as such, have to be dealt with by everyone and between everyone, achieving adaptations which don't violate social harmony".
The manifesto discusses various key events in the story of the Catalan conflict, like the PP's appeal of the 2006 Catalan Statute of Autonomy to the Constitutional Court and the ensuing verdict from the Court, declaring unconstitutional a number of articles of a Statute passed by the Spanish Congress and Senate and a referendum in Catalonia.
The text has been released two days after Spain's new territorial policy minister, Meritxell Batet, said constitutional reform is "urgent, viable and desirable".
Among the signatories are the legal scholars Javier Pérez Royo, María Eugenia Rodríguez Palop and Joaquín Uría; the political scientists Ignacio Sánchez Cuenca, Máriam Martínez Bascuñán Fernando Vallespín, Gemma Ubasart, Antón Losada and Ramón Máiz; the philosophers Victoria Camps, Antonio García-Santesmases and José Luis Villacañas and the historians Julián Casanova i Miren Llona.