The Constitutional Court has endorsed the decision of the president of the Congress, Meritxell Batet, to withdraw from the session diary the affirmation of the deputy of the PP Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo that Pablo Iglesias was "the son of a terrorist". The court has reported this Monday that it has dismissed the amparo appeal filed by Álvarez de Toledo.
"I am going to tell you for the first and last time: you are the son of a terrorist. You belong to that aristocracy, to that of political crime," said the deputy in a plenary session in May 2020. After Batet's decision, that phrase was finally left in the newspaper between brackets and in italics and accompanied by a footnote: "Words withdrawn by the Presidency, in accordance with article 104.3 of the Regulations of the Chamber."
The Second Chamber of the TC considers that the decision of the president, who alleged that the expression used was "contrary to decorum", is not "manifestly arbitrary or discriminatory".
Nor could it be described as discriminatory, because there is no evidence that something like this had been allowed before: "The appellant has not identified similar cases that would have passed without presidential correction."
The decision comes after a court of first instance in Zamora rejected the demand of the father of Iglesias for the alleged interference in his honor by the deputy. The judge refused to grant compensation, estimating that there was an "undoubted factual basis" in the statement, given the repeated mentions by the former leader of Podemos to his father's militancy in the Frap.
In the Constitutional resolution, focused solely on the withdrawal of the session log, the magistrates emphasize that the word terrorist "has a pejorative denotation of the highest intensity and the attribution of this condition to the father of the person questioned objectively entailed an unequivocal discredit for whom, however, he was completely unrelated to the debate, so the Presidential decision could not be considered manifestly arbitrary for a reasonable observer."
The resolution, for which Judge César Tolosa has been a speaker, maintains that the freedom of speech of citizen representatives is "essential" for "the institutionalization of political debate based on freedom and pluralism." And that Batet's decision led to "a public disapproval or reproach for the deputy."
It is added that the agreement of the Presidency to "restrict or mediate" the debate is subject to constitutional control, although with some "particularly rigorous limits, which are the parliamentary autonomy from which the rules relating to the power of the president of a Chamber in order to direct the debates and, specifically, to the appreciation of whether or not some specific words affect decorum". "Without the Court", concludes the sentence, "can subrogate itself in the position of the Presidency of the Congress of Deputies".
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