The Supreme Court has denied the Francisco Franco National Foundation the legitimacy to appeal the changes in the Madrid street map, in application of the Historical Memory Law, that do not affect streets and squares specifically referring to the figure of “the dictator”.
The Contentious-Administrative Chamber considers that extending the active legitimacy of the foundation “beyond its figure, to reach the preservation of its legacy, without identifying what exactly that legacy consists of, nor why it considers it worthy of being transmitted to subsequent generations, would mean expanding the field of active legitimacy to a plurality of unlimited sectoral fields”.
He considers that it would not be difficult for the foundation “to relate new acts to what has happened during four decades of the history of Spain, and through this successive expansion to become, or it would be very similar, a kind of ‘sui generis’ popular action” , something for which an express legal provision would be required.
The magistrates insist that in this way the door would be opened to legitimization without limit, since it is “a legacy after four decades of very personal exercise of power, in which, as happens in this type of regime, nothing was foreign to the figure of the dictator”.
The ruling of the Fourth Section, for which the progressive magistrate Pilar Teso has been a rapporteur, thus ratifies the foundation’s appeal against the ruling of the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid that upheld that lack of legitimacy to oppose all the streets that changed their name, except for the Plaza del Caudillo and the Travesía del General Franco. The foundation opposed 52 name changes.
The Chamber affirms that the appellant party does not show what, specifically, the benefit caused by the maintenance of the name of the streets consists of, after a possible annulment. Nor does it identify what specific utility or advantage would be derived from such annulment for the appellant.
“Nor, finally, the specific damage caused by the change of street names is expressed, except for the feeling of nostalgia produced by the passage of time that increases with the arrival of very different ones, as we infer from the argument put forward. This type of feelings cannot integrate […] an interest worthy of the protection provided by the legal system when it comes to the exercise of the action in the contentious-administrative order”, underlines the court.
The sentence includes a dissenting opinion of magistrate José Luis Requero in which he maintains that the appeal should have been upheld and the appealed sentence annulled.
The magistrate appreciates “a legitimate interest to oppose an act dictated in application of Law 52/2007 of Historical Memory” and detects “a direct link between what was aired in the lawsuit – whether or not there is exaltation of Francoism in the name of certain streets – and the purposes of the appellant in favor of that regime”.
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