Is regularization in danger? What do jurists and entities say

Barcelona / MadridThe final stretch of the extraordinary regularization process for migrants promoted by the Spanish government is coming to an end with an open judicial front. Given the doubts raised by the Supreme Court about the measure's compatibility with European law, experts consulted by ARA agree that it is unlikely to have immediate effects on the applications submitted. While the legal world points to possible shortcomings in the processing, organizations and groups that have helped migrants with paperwork – often fighting against misinformation and lack of resources and suffering from administrative collapse– are now focusing all their efforts on ensuring that applicants can complete the procedures before the deadline expires this Tuesday.

From the legal world, lawyer and deputy responsible for the immigration commission of the Barcelona Bar Association (ICAB), Quim Clavaguera, questions whether the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) will rule in favor of invalidating the regularizations and, on the contrary, states that there may indeed be a reprimand for how the process was carried out and it may even end up imposing a fine on the State. However, he indicates that the approved regularizations are "acquired rights" and, moreover, the EU court may take years to assess the Supreme Court's request; a period during which the beneficiaries of the procedure will have already had to renew their documentation.

Despite everything, Clavaguera points out that the entire regularization process has been carried out "chaotically" and "hastily" from the beginning, with various criteria and requirements to access the procedures, and that once the windows for collecting documentation were opened, there was also confusion, as seen in the fact that five weeks after the process began, the Ministry of Social Rights had to step in to resolve doubts and confusions. In this regard, the lawyer indicates that documents were requested that were not necessary and warns that now the "chaos" is in the National Police stations, where appointments for fingerprint collection cannot be found.

The Supreme Court's move has caught social entities in the final stages of the regularization process. Albert Parés, a lawyer specializing in migration at the Noves Vies Association, assures ARA that the Supreme Court's decision "will not affect" the regularization process because it ends, precisely, this Tuesday.

Victoria Columba is spokesperson for Regularización Ya, the entity that promoted the signature collection that allowed the process to open, and dedicates the day to going to the queues that occur at Social Security or National Police stations. She dismisses that the judicial route has any traction in the court's gesture and frames it as an attempt by "the far-right to exert political influence" in the face of the success of granting rights to thousands of people. For the activist, moreover, it is another of "the obstacles, the bureaucratic labyrinth, the institutional racism" that the immigrant population encounters, and she recalls that they were already able to halt the precautionary measures that Vox, Hazte Oír, and the Community of Madrid presented before the same Supreme Court to try to prevent the process from starting.

Along the same lines, Maria Creixell, from the Coordinadora Obrim Fronteres (a collaborating entity in the process), states that today's sole objective is to be able to register all applications "until 11:59 PM" and that "from tomorrow" they will see if they have to "battle" for other issues.