The State Prosecutor's Office and the State Attorney's Office have opposed this Monday in the Supreme Court the suspension of the registration in the electoral roll of the beneficiaries of the Democratic Memory Law, the so-called grandchildren law, which grants nationality to the descendants of exile and emigration. The stoppage of this registration has been claimed as a precautionary measure by Vox and the Iustitia Europa party, within the appeal they have presented in the high court against an agreement last July of the Central Electoral Board (JEC) by which this body declared itself incompetent to rule on the effects of the law on grandchildren on the census. Both the public ministry and the Lawyers consider that what the far-right parties really intend by challenging this agreement is to torpedo said law and have demanded that the Supreme Court reject their requests because, among other effects, the suspension of registration in the census would deprive these new Spaniards of the right to vote, a fundamental right included in the Constitution.
The parties, the lawyer of the Cortes (representing the National Institute of Statistics), the Legal Profession and the Prosecutor's Office have presented their arguments during two consecutive hearings (one for each appeal) held in the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court. MEP Jorge Buxadé has intervened on behalf of Vox, who has warned the judges that, if they deny his request, the Electoral Census of Absent Residents (CERA) “will continue to increase in an anomalous, if not illegal, manner.” “It will have contributed to a gigantic and massive fraud,” he assured.
According to the latest data provided at the end of June by the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, until March 31, 2.4 million people had made an appointment at consular offices to present their application for access to nationality under the Memory Law; 1.2 million were officially presented in these offices and 544,722 have already been approved, of which 306,000 are already registered in the registry. Buxadé, for its part, has added other data: that the census of residents abroad has increased in the last two months by more than 29,000 people, and by 403,466 since 2023, "given the massive volume of new nationals without roots neither of their parents nor of their grandparents." This increase, however, is not only due to the national benefits derived from the grandchildren law, but to all those granted in that period.
The president of Iustitua Europa, Luis Pardo, has also demanded that the Supreme Court suspend the census effects of the grandchildren law due to the risk of there being “irreversible effects” on the CERA. “The risk is very specific: that the sentence arrives when it can no longer be materially useful,” said Pardo after highlighting that the census for the 2027 regional and municipal elections will close in 116 days, on January 1. The president of Iustitia has focused on the CERA, warning that official files identify 162 municipalities where the voters registered in this census equal or exceed residents in Spain and 558 where they reach at least 50% of the total.
The representative of the Electoral Board has denied that this body has incurred in the “abdication” of responsibilities of which the two ultra parties accuse it and has recalled that the JEC has requested more information from the Electoral Census Office about the updating of the CERA and has requested the preparation of an instruction on aspects that have not been clear, such as the criteria by which it is determined in which municipality each CERA voter is registered. For the Cortes lawyer, therefore, the appeal in the Supreme Court is “premature.”
Both this lawyer and the State lawyer and the prosecutor have denied that the rejection of the request of the two parties could cause “irreparable harm”, one of the essential criteria for the admission of a precautionary measure. For the public ministry and the representatives of the Government and the Courts, what would cause irreversible damage is suspending the registration in the electoral roll of those nationalized by the law on grandchildren, because it would deprive them of the right to vote.
“The right to vote is a fundamental right and cannot be suspended collectively,” recalled the Cortes lawyer, while the State lawyer has stressed that the electoral law (Loreg) establishes the mandatory nature of registration in the census of all Spaniards over 18 years of age, without distinguishing the route of access to nationality, and that this right can only be suspended by a final criminal sentence.
