Time.news – The Spanish Constitutional Court decided on Wednesday, in plenary session, to recognize the admissibility of the complaint against the obligation of anti-Covid vaccination of the elderly and vaccinated minors. Two people, who were forced to be vaccinated by court order, filed this legal appeal: the first lives in the Canary Islands, the second in the north of the country, in the city of Zaragoza. Thousands of people in the same situation should follow the decision of the supreme judicial body with interest.
The depositaries of the complaint are individuals in a situation of great vulnerability. Because of their age and their state of health, they were not in a position to give their informed consent, one of them being a resident of a retirement home, under the absolute yoke of the administrative management and medical. The decision to give him the vaccine was made against the advice of the families. The authorities of these institutions in charge of care, faced with the refusal of the families, had opted for legal recourse. Each time, the judges had ruled that the vaccine had to be coercively inoculated. These legal actions have sometimes been accompanied by the loss of guardianship or the right to visit families opposing the injection of the vaccine.
The body in charge of constitutional guarantees considers the complaint admissible on the grounds that it “understands that these remedies pose a problem which affects the principle of equality, the fundamental right to physical and moral integrity, the right to protection of health and to personal and family privacy”. Once again, the Spanish TC is illustrated by the reminder of the founding bioethical and democratic principles.
The plaintiffs’ argument is based on the idea that the inoculation of a drug in the experimental phase must necessarily respect the consent of the patient. If necessary, it violates the Spanish Constitution as well as many international conventions. It is this argument that the Spanish Supreme Court recognizes as admissible. For a case to be dealt with by the Court, it must go beyond the singular case. The TC recognizes in its writing that the appeals leading to a decision of judicial vaccination, pose “a legal question of relevance and general social repercussion”. It remains to be seen whether the Spanish TC will retain the concept of abuse of weakness among its expectations.
The Spanish Constitutional Court will have distinguished itself, among all the nations within the framework of which, laws, decrees, standards and other covid ukases have imposed themselves for two years, as being the one which has decided most often in coherence with its Charter of fundamental rights. Last July, the Court again suspended the vaccination obligation imposed on certain categories of the population, such as health personnel, in certain autonomous communities, in this case in the Basque Country. In the same way, all the confinements and curfews pronounced have been declared unconstitutional, one by one, by the same authority.
Depending on how the TC could decide, this could open the way to a whole casuistry. In addition to people inoculated by court order, there are other forms of coercion such as blackmail, such as having to choose between complying with vaccination orders or being laid off. If robed men have been an absentee during the eclipse of the rule of law, justified by the health crisis, it would seem that there is at least one instance within southern Europe, for that the Constitution is not an obsolete artifact.