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The Catalan Ombudsman considers the Constitutional Court’s decision on Article 78 of the Statute of Autonomy outdated, inappropriate and inefficient
The Catalan Ombudsman, following an initial assessment of the Constitutional Court’s ruling on the Statute, finds that the decision will curtail Catalonia’s right to self-government, and the democratic objectives that validate it, such as the preferential language of administrations, although the part of the appeal affecting the Statute’s title on rights is still under deliberation.
As for the Catalan Ombudsman institution, the Constitutional Court has deemed unconstitutional the term of exclusivity established in Article 78 of the Catalan Statute of Autonomy, which referred to the Catalan Ombudsman’s competency to exclusively supervise the Administration of the Generalitat (Autonomous Government of Catalonia) and its related bodies.
It is considered outdated because in modern democracies with decentralized states -either federal or autonomous- such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, Austria and Argentina, when there is a regional-level ombudsman that supervises the regional administration, if this figure co-exists with a state-level institution, the latter does not intervene in regional affairs. Along these lines, the Constitutional Court’s ruling is markedly outdated, untimely and inappropriate for a decentralized state model such as that of a state of autonomous communities.
