The Constitutional Court has rejected the appeal that the Popular Party filed against the rule that the Government approved during the worst of the pandemic to suspend evictions of the most vulnerable people while the state of alarm was in force, even if they were involved in criminal proceedings due to irregular occupation. The majority of the plenary session, with two conservative votes against, understands that the measure of the central executive did not violate the right to property of those who urged the evictions and emphasizes that it only delayed the launches for “a brief period of time” in the face of the allegations of the PP, who came to maintain in public that this royal decree-law protected the illegal occupation of homes.
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The measure was announced by the executive at the end of 2020, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. A royal decree-law that was modified in March 2021 and that, in practice, prevented executing an eviction or release in cases of vulnerable people without some type of housing alternative. “The judge will have the power to suspend the launch until the end of the state of alarm,” said this rule on cases that came from criminal proceedings.
The PP questioned several points of this rule before the Constitutional Court, alleging that it violated the right to property of the owners of the houses that had requested the eviction, as well as their right to the execution of judicial decisions, taking into account that the measure could affect release and eviction processes requested by a court as a result, for example, of a criminal proceeding.
The majority of the plenary session of the Constitutional Court, as El Español has advanced and the guarantee court has confirmed, has rejected the appeal of the formation of Alberto Núñez Feijóo. This measure, say the magistrates, does not regulate the right to property, had a limited scope and, responding to a “purpose of social interest”, had a “minimum and temporary” impact on the owners who, in addition, “may be subject to of economic compensation” according to the court itself.
This 2020 rule and its 2021 extension also does not violate the effective judicial protection of the owners, as the PP stated in its appeal, regarding the obstacle to the execution of sentences in criminal cases of illegal occupation of homes. “The enforceability of the sentences is not questioned by the challenged norm, it is only delayed for a brief period of time, and this in accordance with the decision adopted by the judicial body, once the concurrent circumstances in each case have been weighed,” says the Constitutional . This royal decree-law, he concludes, does not alter “the structural or essential elements of the judicial process.”
This sentence has two contrary votes: those of the conservatives Enrique Arnaldo and Concepción Espejel. They do understand that this rule crosses the red lines established for a royal decree-law by affecting “in an intense way” the right of owners to dispose of supposedly irregularly occupied homes: “The owner is obliged to support and tolerate the use without a title to their home by those who are involved in a criminal proceeding and occupy a home without an enabling title for it ”, they criticize.