ADE rejects the outsourcing of consular work and the “lack of transparency” in the application of the “Grandchildren Law”

The Diplomat The Spanish Diplomats Association (ADE) has warned against "the outsourcing of work assigned to the consular network" and against the "lack of transparency and clarity" in the context of naturalization processes under the Democratic Memory Law (the "Grandchildren Law") or the regularization of immigrants, and has defended "the integrity and professionalism of civil servants, including diplomats performing consular duties." In a press release published on July 14, the ADE reiterated its concern about "the prolonged neglect suffered by the Spanish Foreign Service and, in particular, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation (MAEUEC), the only ministerial department whose raison d'être is the State's external action and serving Spanish citizens abroad." “The precariousness of human, material, technical, and infrastructural resources, the result of decades of governmental neglect, has been aggravated by the deficient management of the current team of political leaders at the ministry,” it continues. “Whether due to a lack of political will or simple incompetence, they have failed to convince the Council of Ministers of the need to support the significant increase in workload with additional human resources,” generated by “the exponential increase in Spanish citizens abroad and their demand for services, the high number of nationality applications, visa applications, and procedures stemming from the immigrant regularization process, to name just a few functions of the consular network.” According to the ADE, “the political decision not to allocate more civil servants to the consular network and, in general, to the Foreign Service, and to opt instead for the temporary local hiring of public employees entails serious limitations.” “These local employees are necessary and, in many consulates, more so than at present, but they cannot replace civil servants,” the Association warns. For all these reasons, the ADE believes that “outsourcing the work assigned to the consular network is also not a suitable solution” and warns that “it can entail risks and undesirable consequences if it is not carried out transparently and with accurate information provided to those responsible for the units within the consular network, as well as to the public institutions and political actors who request it.” According to the ADE, “this secrecy and lack of clarification, especially within the framework of naturalization processes under the Democratic Memory Law or the procedures for the regularization of immigrants that our consular and diplomatic service must carry out, has serious consequences.” “The most serious is the shadow of doubt cast on the General State Administration and on the reliability of the electoral system itself,” it warns. “In this context, the ADE defends the integrity and professionalism of civil servants, including diplomats in consular roles. State officials know that their primary obligation is to respect the law and, if ordered to break it, to refuse to do so; if that is still not enough, they can resort to mechanisms for reporting or denouncing corruption in its various forms, as both the ADE and FEDECA have been advocating,” the Association asserts. The press release comes after the controversy generated by the president of the People's Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, when he denounced at the end of June that the “Grandchildren Law” is an “electoral ploy” implemented by the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, to grant voting rights to 2.5 million people in a very short period of time. He also asserted that “there is a great deal of arbitrariness” in the procedure for registering new Spanish citizens on the electoral roll, which could lead to the assignment of provinces to these new citizens based on the electoral needs of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party). For her part, the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, warned that “every consul and every official who grants citizenship to someone who doesn't deserve it should know that they too would be acting illegally, and that serves as our warning.” Meanwhile, the secretary general of Vox in Congress, José María Figaredo, declared that this law constitutes a “slow-motion coup d'état” and demanded that Spaniards residing abroad be denied the right to vote by mail. Following the PP's complaints, Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares stated that "what the Popular Party wants is for three and a half million Spaniards to be unable to vote," and denounced the "enormous hypocrisy" of Feijóo and the PP because "what they included in their 2023 electoral program was precisely this law."

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