The PSOE is trying again to allow a foreign minister to sit in a Council of Ministers

The Diplomat The PSOE is going to try again to get Congress to approve a modification of the Law of Government to allow a foreign minister to participate as a guest in a meeting of the Council of Ministers, reports Europa Press. This is a provision included in a bilateral treaty signed with France that has not yet been implemented because the relevant legal change has not been made. The Government tried to introduce it via an amendment to the Parity Law, but had to rectify in the face of objections from the legal services of the Equality Commission, and three months later it is trying again by taking advantage of an organic law on the efficiency of the Public Service of Justice. It was in January 2023 when the Governments of Spain and France, meeting at a bilateral summit in Barcelona, signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation which provides that "a member of the Government of one of the parties will be invited to the Council of Ministers of the other Party, at least once every three months and on a rotating basis." But the Division of Treaties and Other International Agreements of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs revealed two months later that the signed treaty "seems to conflict with the Government Law, which establishes in a fixed manner the composition of the Council of Ministers." Moncloa directed a consultation to the Council of State, which in May of last year ruled that this provision of the Spanish-French agreement effectively requires legislative reforms. For this reason, and taking advantage of the processing of the Parity Law, the PSOE and Sumar registered an amendment in April to modify article 5.2 of the Government Law of 1997 and, to the current wording that establishes that "secretaries of State and exceptionally other high-ranking officials may attend the meetings of the Council of Ministers, when they are summoned for this purpose", add the following: "without prejudice to the provisions of international treaties validly signed by Spain". But the lawyer of the Equality Commission warned that this amendment, like the one presented by the Government parties to end the Senate's irrevocable veto power over stability objectives, had no relation to the Parity Law and could be unconstitutional. PSOE and Sumar continued with the amendment restricting the Upper House's veto power, which ended up being included in the Parity Law and is now a reality as it has been published in the BOE, but they gave up on the change regarding the attendance of foreign officials in the Council of Ministers.Until this summer, when the PSOE, now without Sumar, registered the same amendment alone, this time to the "organic law of measures regarding the efficiency of the Public Service of Justice and collective actions for the protection and defence of the rights and interests of consumers and users". If the legal change succeeds in this second attempt, in a few months a minister from the French Republic or from any other friendly country with which a treaty similar to that signed with France is signed will be allowed to sit on the Council. In any case, article 5.3, which emphasises that the deliberations of the Council of Ministers are secret, is maintained. Furthermore, in the same amendment, to which Europa Press had access, the PSOE proposes to modify another article of the Government Law - 26.2 - to clarify the cases in which the public consultation process can be waived for draft laws, draft legislative royal decrees and regulatory norms. This technical clarification refers to a recent ruling by the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court. According to the court, in the case of regulatory norms of the General State Administration, in order to waive the prior public consultation process, the different circumstances already provided for in the law must occur in an accumulated manner. But the socialists point out that other previous Supreme Court rulings, as well as the Law on Common Administrative Procedure for Public Administrations and the doctrine of the Council of State, had already made it clear that public consultation can be dispensed with when "any" of the circumstances provided for occur, without the need for them all to occur at the same time. To clarify the rule, what has been done is to change the wording, but not the content. Specifically, the amendment proposes separating all the circumstances already in force by headings preceded by the corresponding letters instead of by commas or conjunctions.

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