At the same time as the Spanish Constitutional Court is discussing how it will respond to the appeals that seek to halt the parliamentary processing of the reform of the Penal Code and the system for electing judges of the court itself, a couple of kilometres away, Spain's Senate has seen the deadline pass - this Monday at 2pm - for submitting partial and full amendments to the same bill. The parties of the Spanish right - the People's Party (PP), Vox, Ciudadanos (Cs) and Navarra's UPN - along with Together for Catalonia (Junts) - have all registered amendments to the entirety of the bill, which is to say that these parties have declared their intention to reject the proposed legislation entirely. As well as this, other parties have proposed a total of 55 further amendments on top of a document which is in itself a multi-faceted amendment bill.
The Spanish right-wing parties are all in agreement on the 'vetos' presented in the register of the upper house and are strongly critical of both the substance and form of the proposed law, especially the fact that the procedure has been given urgency and in a matter of a week will have passed through both legislative chambers, since the Spanish government when supported by its usual allies has the numbers to get the bill through the Senate. For its part, Junts set out its own reasons for opposing the bill, and is very critical of one of those Spanish government allies, the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), since, with this reform, it considers that the Republicans are assuming that "the 2017 referendum was a criminal act".
"Offence to the Spanish people"
In its text rejecting the bill, the PP complements its arguments calling for the withdrawal of the bill with the fact that it is an "inadmissible offence to the Spanish people and the Pact of the Transition", referring to the changes to the way of electing judges in the Constitutional Court when appointments have expired. "Legislating in violation of the law and against the criteria of the lawyers of Congress, who warned of the illegality of some amendments, is an outrage, an attempt to liquidate the rule of law", add the PP. According to Vox, the reform of the Penal Code proposed by the Spanish government is "one of the most inadmissible abuses in the history of Spanish parliamentarism" and the far-right party warns that this "anticipates a perverse situation" because there are "serious threats to national unity" that "the Socialist and Communist members of the Spanish government, together with their separatist partners, want to achieve".
Finally, Ciudadanos uses the statements of the president of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès, to argue for the need for this position of veto: according to Cs, ERC boasts of the fact that "this criminal reform will make it more difficult to pursue independence". "It is a mockery to talk about calming down the situation when not all the convicts have renounced unilateralism and have declared that they will try to do it again", stresses the fervently anti-independence Cs. Vox and UPN have limited themselves to presenting full amendments to the entirety of the bill, while the PP has also registered 25 partial amendments. The other 30 are made up of 16 by Junts, 13 by Ciudadanos and one from Más Madrid.