Analysis has begun of the ruling of the Constitutional Court of 23 June last, which dismisses the appeals lodged by the Autonomous Communities of La Rioja and Castilla-León, by asserting the constitutionality of the so-called “shielding” of tax provincial legislation. Iñaki Alonso Arce, in last July’s issue of Forum Fiscal nº 222, positively assesses the contents of the ruling in his article “El Concierto Económico y la Constitución” [“The Basque Economic Agreement and the Constitution”], even though, to quote him, “it is true some misgivings could be raised about part of its legal arguments…“.
The Carta Tributaria legal advisor includes an editorial on the same theme in its August issue. Entitled “The Constitutional Court’s jurisdiction regarding the tax provincial legislation of the Basque provinces“, where they state that the “it cannot have been easy for the court to have drafted the ruling that we have today. And it cannot have been easy to do so as it has done, unanimously. The reason is clear: we are not dealing with a problem that is strictly legal in content. As always when delving into provincial legislation, the constitutional political background becomes of key importance, to the point that it absolutely conditions the legal debate. Our Tribunal has reached a solution that means defending the charter system in the strictly constitutional framework“.
