Spain: Constitutionally Conforming Interpretation and Interpretative Judgements in the Spanish Constitutional Court

• Isabel Lifante-Vidal ^[1]
  1. [1] Universitat d'Alacant

     Universitat d'Alacant

     Alicante, España

     
• Localización: Constitutionally Conforming Interpretation: Comparative Perspectives / coord. por Matthias Klatt, 2023, ISBN 9781509953844, págs. 179-195
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In Spain, the issue of constitutionally conforming interpretation (CCI) is usually exclusively discussed in the context of the Constitutional Court and its activity of constitutional review of legislation. The principle of CCI is understood as a mandate given to the Constitutional Court, according to which a precept is declared unconstitutional only when it is impossible to attribute an interpretation that conforms with the Constitution. From this perspective, the measure is usually considered in Spain as a manifestation of the principle of preservation of legal acts. Its justification would be strengthened, in the case of its application to the statutes, by the principle of deference to the legislator, to which the Constitutional Court would be subject in its task of supervising the statutes. The main problem is that CCI can imply – through the mechanism of ‘interpretative judgments’ – the preservation of the validity of legal provisions susceptible of being interpreted contrary to the Constitution, provided they allow for at least one CCI. The Constitutional Court’s interpretation of the legal norms that are hierarchically inferior to the Constitution is binding for all Spanish public powers. This raises a number of compatibility problems with Spain’s institutional design, in which the Constitutional Court has the role of supreme interpreter of the Constitution, but not of the statutes (nor of other legal provisions) – whose interpretation, for their part, is entrusted to the judiciary. The chapter describes the Spanish constitutional justice system before explaining how the principle of CCI has been applied in practice. It finishes by setting out some related problems that are currently discussed, together with the grounds of the principle and its limits.