The Council of Ministers, having declined the invitation to the Community of Madrid to resolve the discrepancies, has approved the challenge before the Constitutional Court of Article 4 of Law 8/2024, of December 26, on measures to improve public management at the local and regional level. The challenge is made by requesting the suspension of the disputed precepts.
In the legislative amendment approved last December, new precepts are included in articles 86, 87, 88 and 89 of Law 1/1983, of 13 December, of the Government and Administration of the Community of Madrid, which are understood to be incompatible with the constitutional distribution of competences, insofar as they «shield» the building of the Real Casa de Correos, current headquarters of the Presidency of the Community of Madrid, to the exclusive and exclusive criterion that the Governing Council of that Autonomous Community has, pretending to link the action of any other public administration in the exercise of the competences that may correspond to that building,
The competences in the field of Democratic Memory empower the State to carry out the actions provided for in Law 20/2022, of October 19, on Democratic Memory, and expressly in Article 52, on the procedure to be followed in the case of concurrence of ownership of other public administrations of a property.
It is unconstitutional to empty its application and execution of content by ignoring the state regime and establishing an autonomous authorization on any action relating to the property, without any limitation or weighting of other public interests or the action of the General Administration of the State.
In addition, the Government of Spain recalls that no Autonomous Community filed an appeal of unconstitutionality against the Democratic Memory Law nor questioned, after its approval in October 2022, the State’s competence to declare Places of Memory.
Background
By agreement of October 16, 2024, the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory’s Directorate-General for Victim Care and the Promotion of Democratic Memory initiated the procedure for declaring the Place of Democratic Memory of the “Defunct General Directorate of Francoist Security”, located in Madrid.
The resolution is issued in accordance with Articles 49 and subsequent LMDs, which regulate the figure of the Places of Democratic Memory, the administrative procedure for their declaration and the legal regime of protection implied by such declaration. The resolution aims to initiate this administrative procedure in relation to the Real Casa de Correos de la Puerta del Sol in Madrid, the current seat of the Presidency of the Community of Madrid.
On December 18, 2024, the Government of the Community of Madrid filed an injunction against the aforementioned resolution. And the Government of the Nation, in the Council of Ministers of January 14, 2025, gave an answer to the aforementioned incompetence request.
Extinct General Directorate of Security of the dictatorship
The so-called General Directorate of Security (DGS), during the dictatorship, played a central role in political and social repression and became a symbol of repression because, in its cellars, thousands of people arrested were interrogated and subjected to torture for political and ideological reasons. Any form of opposition, intellectual or political, was monitored and persecuted by the DGS.
There are numerous testimonies of people who survived those interrogations that coincide in pointing out the extreme cruelty they suffered. They are victims who have the right to be recognized and the population has the right to know what happened then to give guarantees of non-repetition.
Despite the contrasting historical data, the Community of Madrid has systematically refused to even place a plaque, when there are other commemorative plaques in that property, which do not generate any alteration of its functionality.