In the early hours of Sunday morning, the former vice president emeritus of the Constitutional Court Ramón Rodríguez Arribas (Madrid, 1954) died at the age of 89. The news was announced by the Professional Association of the Judiciary (APM), the majority in the judicial career and of which he was president.
“We deeply regret the death of one of our founders, Mr. Ramón Rodríguez Arribas, an active member until the end, an extraordinary jurist and with an unwavering commitment to the Constitution and to Spain,” the association has written in X.
Recently, Rodríguez Arribas had spoken out against the amnesty law that the PSOE is negotiating with the independence movement to achieve the re-election of Pedo Sánchez as President of the Government.
Its approval would mean “publicly acknowledging before Europe and the world that our rule of law was not rule of law during the recent past and that it applied unjust laws and punished as crimes conduct that should not be condemned. How can we reach this humiliation “How can we play this role before Europe? It is absolutely unpresentable,” he declared last September in an interview in Confilegal.
“What the amnesty does is recognize that during a previous time something that was not a crime was punished as a crime. Which is more than an injustice, it is an barbarity, […] a legal aberration and an atrocity, in addition of a historical falsehood and betrayal because Spain has been an example in the world of democracy and, above all, of complete rule of law,” he indicated in another recent interview in Vozpópuli.
“Not everything that is not expressly prohibited by the Constitution is permitted,” he added to explain his position, “because otherwise it would have thousands of articles. Not only should we appeal to constitutional doctrine or public opinion, but to common sense. But how are we going? “to now publicly call into question the stability of our system through a law of this caliber?”
In a recent article published in Eldebate, the former vice president of the TC stated: “If the absurd amnesty law is passed and a self-determination referendum in Catalonia is promoted, even if it is euphemistically disguised, the historic hour will have arrived for our Constitutional Court fulfill the essential mission that we said at the beginning, that is, ‘avoid and, where appropriate, correct, the abuses of the parliamentary majority.'”
Rodríguez Arribas, with a conservative profile, was one of the judges tasked with examining the constitutionality of the Statute. He cast a dissenting vote that advocated the unconstitutionality of several articles that finally passed.
The magistrate arrived at the Constitutional Court from the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court and after having passed through courts in Las Palmas, Ciudad Real and Madrid. In addition to presiding over the APM, he was at the head of the International Union of Judges (UIM), which brings together more than 70 associations of judges. After 52 years as a judge, he dedicated himself to law at the Rodríguez Arribas Abogados office.
