Sijena: reasons to go to the Constitutional Court

There's been a lot of talk these days about the Supreme Court ruling ordering the return to Aragon of the paintings from the Sijena chapter house, works that have been in Catalonia for almost ninety years. Everyone is wondering what to do, and the president of the Generalitat of Catalonia responds that the courts' decision must be abided by, but at the same time, he wants to prevent the paintings from being damaged. There are well-known voices in the international museum community, alarmed, who consider the transfer of the paintings impossible without causing them damage. I share these views, but everything indicates that they will not be enough to stop the transfer. The truth is that the Aragonese courts will do everything possible to avoid halting the execution, and even more so will the Aragonese authorities, who, incidentally, are not in a position to ensure the proper conditions of the Sijena monastery to avoid damaging the paintings.

Obviously, the Supreme Court's erroneous ruling lacked legal sensitivity in acknowledging what the Constitutional Court's ruling of January 18, 2012, recognized: that Aragon's jurisdiction over the assets from Sijena conflicted with the jurisdiction of the Generalitat of Catalonia regarding the preservation of Catalan. The Constitutional Court determined that these assets from Sijena were subject to the Catalan public museum administration. And this recognition by the high court is even more relevant given that the MNAC is a public consortium, with state participation, that houses the largest collection of Romanesque mural art in the world.

The Aragonese institutions have presented the dispute as a political issue. In this approach, legal reflection has failed, despite the Generalitat's attempts to focus on legal issues. Given these circumstances, what should be done? What should be done? My answer is clear: in my opinion, the only course of action is to file an appeal for protection before the Constitutional Court. Although it may go wrong, it is the only option available to us if we do not want the paintings to triumphantly arrive in Aragon before Christmas. Going to the Constitutional Court is entirely justified, as I believe that the courts that have heard this dispute over the paintings have violated my provisions.in Article 24 of the Constitution because they have put the Generalitat in a defenseless situationor clear.

The lawsuit was a legal action brought by the government of Aragon against the MNAC. The Aragonese government acted on behalf of the nuns, in accordance with dubious powers. The lawsuit claimed the paintings from the MNAC, considering that the museum held them as precarious, that is, without title. Given these circumstances, the Generalitat of Catalonia appeared—as a third party with a direct interest—to argue that it, and not the MNAC, had legal possession of the paintings, without prejudice to the Generalitat itself displaying them in a museum under its jurisdiction. The Generalitat argued that the Catalan institutions could not be considered precarious, without title, since on December 17, 1992, the nuns of Sijena had made a deposit in favor of the Generalitat for the indefinite display of the paintings. This meant transforming the deposit into a loan, that is, linking the deposit to a specific purpose, in this case a museum purpose, which meant that the goods could be retained for the duration of that purpose.

This is precisely what the Generalitat sought to prove, a point that could have radically changed the course of the litigation. However, the courts systematically refused to allow the Generalitat to provide its deposit certificate (commodado) to the legal proceedings. Nor did they accept the documents proving the museum's activity.

Faced with this evident lack of protection, the Generalitat has no other option but to follow the path of the Constitutional Court. This court can refuse to admit the appeal, as it did in the dispute over the pieces from the Lleida museum, but in that case, there was a different balance of power within the Constitutional Court. Certainly, if the appeal before the Constitutional Court were successful, this would not mean the suspension of the Supreme Court's ruling, but here there would be a strong legal case to halt the transfer of the paintings and paralyze the execution of the ruling. The argument that the paintings cannot be transferred from one place to another while a court is hearing the dispute would be understandable.

Xavier Muñoz Puiggròs has been a lawyer for the Generalitat in the Sijena conflict.