MADRID, Spain – There is evidence that the government is naturalising foreigners who do not genuinely meet the requirements to avail themselves of the grandchildren’s law, namely people who have provided no documentary proof that their ancestors were Spanish and had to leave the country as a consequence of the Civil War, THE OBJETIVE reported.
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Everything originates in the controversial eighth additional provision of the popularly known grandchildren’s law, the Democratic Memory Law, and very particularly in the instruction drafted and promoted by Sofía Puente, then head of the Directorate General of Legal Security and Public Faith at the Ministry of Justice. That guideline, approved by fait accompli and behind the back of the Cortes Generales, drastically relaxed the evidentiary requirements imposed by the legal text itself approved in Congress, opening a veritable floodgate of naturalisations whose validity is now under judicial scrutiny. According to official figures recently provided by the government itself to the Supreme Court, since the Democratic Memory Law came into force around 2.4 million nationality applications have been registered at consulates around the world, and of that global figure the executive admits that more than 163,000 nationalities have already been granted to people who availed themselves of Sofía Puente’s guideline. Consular sources consulted, however, categorically deny the containment of the official narrative and describe that figure as absolutely ridiculous, assuring that the impact of the instruction by Sofía Puente, sister of minister Óscar Puente, is colossal: in the Mexico consular district alone, more than 90 per cent of applications that have been approved and ended in effective naturalisation have been processed under the guideline devised by Sofía Puente, bypassing the political exile requirements set by the law passed in Parliament.
To understand the real scope of the allegedly irregular procedure that the consular network has been validating with the acquiescence of the Ministry of Justice, various files granted at the General Consulate of Spain in Mexico have been analysed in detail. One of the cases revealed is that of Juan G., an 82-year-old Mexican citizen born on 7 October 1944 in Mexico City, who applied for and obtained Spanish nationality with the corresponding issuance of his European Union passport without a single baptism certificate, birth certificate or other documents in his file attesting that any of his parents or grandparents was Spanish or had to leave the peninsula for political reasons. The documentation held at the consulate shows that the applicant’s parents, Juan Manuel and Consuelo, were born in Mexico in 1913 and 1918 respectively, that is, both parents were born in the Mexican Republic before 1920 and decades before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War or the establishment of the Franco dictatorship. To base his request for naturalisation through the urgent route of Annex I of Law 20/2022, the applicant provided only a marriage certificate contracted by his parents in Mexico and his testimony affirming that his paternal grandfather, who hypothetically must have been born at the end of the 19th century, was Spanish. With only this indicative data, without any registry verification in Spain as to the nature of the grandfather’s citizenship, officials at the Consulate of Spain in Mexico proceeded to grant Spanish nationality as of right, a case that is legally incomprehensible when compared with the literal wording of Annex I of the eighth additional provision of the Democratic Memory Law, under which nationality was granted to Juan G., the norm stating categorically that those born outside Spain to a father or mother, grandfather or grandmother who were originally Spanish and who, as a consequence of having suffered exile for political, ideological or belief or sexual orientation and identity reasons, had lost or renounced Spanish nationality may opt for Spanish nationality.
In the case uncovered, the temporal and historical incongruity is absolute, since even if the applicant’s grandfather were Spanish, he emigrated to Mexico at the end of the 19th century, a time when a constitutional monarchy with a parliament and universal male suffrage prevailed in Spain during the Bourbon Restoration, making it materially and chronologically impossible for that ancestor to have been a victim of reprisals, political exile or ideological persecution motivated by the Civil War or the Franco regime, events that occurred almost half a century later. Likewise, neither Juan’s father, born in Mexico in 1913, nor his mother, born in Mexico in 1918, were forced to flee the country during the Franco dictatorship, given that they were born, grew up and resided in Mexican territory. Despite the manifest absence of the exile through persecution requirement set by the legislature, the administrative shortcut designed by the Directorate General of Legal Security and Public Faith allowed someone completely lacking the required legal link to be elevated to the status of Spanish citizen, and it was done on 9 June 2023, a month and a half before the 23 July general election that the PP won but that made possible, with the sum of parties, a new government under Pedro Sánchez.
Judicial sources consulted say the case could constitute a crime of falsification of public documents with the aim of swelling the electoral roll and should be investigated through the criminal route, adding that Juan, who became interested in Spanish nationality at 82, was not just any citizen, since according to internal messages exchanged between consulate staff he was a senior official and a friend of the consul general who was given special treatment. This type of naturalisation is being carried out thanks to an interpretation of the grandchildren’s law drawn up by Sofía Puente after it passed through the Cortes, with the regulation, whose background dates back to the 2007 Historical Memory Law approved during José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s mandate, later developed through the 2022 Democratic Memory Law, which provides for nationality for descendants of Spaniards who suffered persecution or violence during the Civil War and the dictatorship, its application having been twisted to the point of giving rise to an unjustified expansion of the electoral roll.
First, the beneficiaries of the law were extended to the descendants of those who left Spain during the Franco era, which is why it received the popular name of the grandchildren’s law, and then Sofía Puente, sister of minister Óscar Puente, introduced a presumption the law does not expressly contemplate: that every person who left Spain between 18 July 1936 and 31 December 1955 was an exile, without distinguishing the reasons for their departure, also extending the possibility of accessing nationality to the descendants of those who had a father or mother, grandfather or grandmother who were originally Spanish and who, as a consequence of having suffered exile for political reasons, without specifying the period in which that exile occurred nor requiring, according to this interpretation, documentary proof that the departure from Spain was indeed due to political reasons. The Supreme Court ended up dealing a harsh blow to the department by decreeing the precautionary suspension of Sofía Puente’s guideline, finding serious indications of illegality for having modified substantive aspects of a law through a simple instruction, warning in its rulings of the irreparable risk of granting nationality, and with it the right to vote, to people who do not comply with the law.
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Despite the forceful brake imposed by the Supreme Court, the government is resisting compliance with the setback and insists on maintaining the institutional standoff, and in a last attempt to save the network of irregular naturalisations on the eve of elections, Moncloa has activated Ombudsman Ángel Gabilondo, a former PSOE minister, to file an amparo appeal with extremely urgent precautionary measures before the Constitutional Court, with the aim of placing the ball in the court of guarantees chaired by Cándido Conde-Pumpido in the hope that the allied bloc comes to the rescue and reactivates the census of those naturalised through this route, consuming what in legal circles is already openly described as a veritable blow to the cleanliness of democratic elections.
