The Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court has issued a new order confirming the final annulment of the Governing Plan for Use and Management of the Chinijo Archipelago Natural Park, dismissing another appeal filed by the Government of the Canary Islands. The ruling was made on December 17, the day on which the regional Executive published the annulment of the Chinijo Archipelago PRUG in the Official Gazette of the Canary Islands (BOC), after the TSJC threatened it two months earlier with fines for not executing another previous ruling that definitively overturned the planning in June 2016.
In this last case, the regional Executive filed a complaint with the Supreme Court, after the Court of First Instance denied it the preparation of an appeal against one of the rulings that annulled the PRUG of the Chinijo Archipelago "for not having adequately and sufficiently justified the grounds for appeal".
The Government of the Canary Islands argued that said appeal should be admitted "because another one on the same subject was previously admitted" in another of the open proceedings. However, the Supreme Court considers that "such an approach is unfounded." "Each appeal, individually considered, must by itself meet the conditions and requirements of appealability and elaboration, formal and material, to which the Law conditions its admissibility; it cannot be accepted that an appeal is, without more, automatically admissible by the mere fact that another one with which it is related could have been previously admitted," the ruling states.
An appeal that has also "become moot"
In addition, the Contentious-Administrative Chamber points out that the appeal taken as a reference precedent by the Government of the Canary Islands was processed "in accordance with the old and repealed legal regulation", in which "its admissibility was governed by rules and principles qualitatively different from those that structure the currently in force regulation".
Likewise, the Supreme Court recalls that this appeal was already dismissed by the Supreme Court, which issued a ruling on December 20, 2017, definitively annulling the PRUG of the Chinijo Archipelago, so it considers that "it is possible to understand" that the appeal that the regional Executive tried to file later in another of the proceedings "has become moot."
"Regardless of whether an appeal for protection has been filed against that ruling with the Constitutional Court, this does not exclude that, in a procedural perspective, we are facing a formal ruling that renders the appeal that is intended to be prepared against the same agreement already declared null and void," the Supreme Court points out, which thus dismisses the complaint filed by the legal services of the Government of the Canary Islands.
