The Plenary of the Constitutional Court has rejected the appeal for amparo filed against the refusal of the High Court of Justice of the Balearic Islands to translate into Spanish a decision issued in Catalan. The decision has been made with the support of seven magistrates, while another four have announced a particular vote.
The sentence, for which Judge María Luisa Segoviano has been a rapporteur, considers that the decision of the Contentious Chamber of the TSJ does not violate the right to effective judicial protection, considering that in the circumstances of the case no constitutionally relevant defenselessness derived from the use of said language, co-official in the Balearic Islands.
The appellant was the company Accesos de Ibiza, S.A., awarded the contract for the construction and operation of the motorway from the airport to Ibiza. The affected judicial procedure focused on the payment of various remunerations derived from the concession that it maintains with the Balearic Government. And the translation claim affected a clarification order on a certain date that included the sentence. The company had not objected that the initial sentence was only in Catalan.
The judgment of the Constitutional Court highlights that constitutional jurisprudence, in those cases in which defenselessness is linked to the use of an autonomous language, has established that its control is limited to verifying that this supposed defenselessness “has its immediate and direct origin in that particular judicial action” and that generates a “real, effective and current material defenselessness, never potential or abstract”.
From this, the TC concludes that the alleged defenselessness does not have its origin in the refusal of the translation, despite having formulated the appeal in those terms. The Constitutional indicates that the doubts of the appellant would only have been resolved with a rectification of the wording of the sentence, “regardless of the Catalan or Spanish language that had been used”.
Judges Ricardo Enríquez, Enrique Arnaldo, César Tolosa and Concepción Espejel have announced a particular vote against the decision. They understand that the amparo should have been granted, as the TC Prosecutor’s Office had supported.
The four magistrates consider that the judicial body’s refusal to translate judicial decisions written in Catalan into Spanish violated their right to effective judicial protection, causing them material defenselessness. They highlight that the Organic Law of the Judiciary obliges judges and magistrates who write in their own co-official language to proceed with its translation into Spanish when they are interested in the party who alleges defenselessness.
The precept that they wield establishes that the translation will be ex officio when the judicial decisions must take effect outside the CCAA, adding that “it will also proceed to its translation when so provided by law or at the request of a party that claims defenselessness”.
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