The Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Torres, announced on Tuesday that the Government will appeal to the Constitutional Court the Cantabria project to eliminate the Historical Memory legislation. The Cantabrian Government, made up of the PP with occasional support from Vox, recently approved the start of the process to eliminate the Historical and Democratic Memory regulations that had been passed years ago by the Regionalist Party of Cantabria and the PSOE. The minister recalled that the Government also took the proposal of Aragon (PP and Vox) to withdraw its regulations in that area to the Constitutional Court, which put a stop to it. Unlike other regions governed by the PP, Cantabria has not indicated whether it intends to promote a “Concord” law. Torres stated that he does not understand the intention of the PP and Vox. “We do not understand in any case why they want to repeal an autonomous law that is also the result of international law and that aims to definitively close an issue that history has not done, which is reparation,” he affirmed in an interview on Cadena SER where he announced that, if the Cantabrian Parliament finally agrees to definitively repeal its memory regulations, the State will file the relevant appeal to the Constitutional Court, as it did in the case of Aragon.
The attitude of the PP and Vox goes against “Human Rights” and against “the right to reparation, justice, truth, and non-repetition,” clarified the high-ranking official. He recalled that UN rapporteurs have recently expressed concern about the legislative movements of certain autonomous communities against previous laws or decrees on Historical and Democratic Memory. “There cannot be laws like the one that the Government of Cantabria now intends to approve that does not facilitate memorial associations in recovering the remains of those in mass graves in the community,” Torres asserted, criticizing that the regional Government led by María José Sáenz de Buruaga “does not want to clearly condemn the Dictatorship and equate periods of freedom with periods of totalitarianism.”
The PP governs in Cantabria alone and occasionally relies on Vox or the PRC to advance different policies. The regionalists, along with the socialist group, voted against initiating the procedures to repeal the memorialist regulations. Other territories have also made progress in the elimination of these laws, although political movements by Vox have disrupted the process. In addition to the example of Aragon, where the Constitutional Court decided to suspend the repeal approved by the Cortes, in Castilla y León, the PP led by Alfonso Fernández Mañueco has halted the Concordia law agreed upon with the far-right. The law was meant to replace a decree on Historical Memory passed by the PP in 2018 when it governed alone, but the breakdown of the Government pact in the community by Vox has allowed Mañueco to freeze that Concordia law, for which there are no deadlines or parliamentary procedures.
