The Land Law approved in the Parliament of the Canary Islands and published in the Official Gazette on June 13 could violate the Constitution. This is the conclusion of a report commissioned by the César Manrique Foundation, which analyzes the constitutionality of this law and concludes that there are breaches in two of the most controversial aspects: the classification and legal regime of rural land and the powers of urban planning.
The opinion has been prepared by Marcos Vaquer Caballería, professor of Administrative Law at the Carlos III University of Madrid, and its conclusions will be delivered by the César Manrique Foundation to the Canary Islands Platform for a Sustainable Territory, with the purpose of preparing an appeal of unconstitutionality that will be presented by Unidos Podemos.
In the section on the classification and legal regime of rural land, the opinion identifies grounds for unconstitutionality in three relevant contents of the Law: the regime of rural settlements, the extension of ordinary uses of rural land and the requirement of integration into the urban fabric for classification as urban land.
"A potentially inexhaustible source of resources"
With regard to the powers of urban planning, the opinion questions how the internormative relations between different territorial entities are treated in the Land Law, whose autonomy is guaranteed by the Constitution. It also questions the constitutionality of the contents of the Law referring to the radical nullity of plans that exceed the minimum necessary content, which, moreover, constitutes, in the opinion of Professor Marcos Vaquer, "a potentially inexhaustible source of contentious-administrative appeals".
Finally, in this section, the extraordinary planning instruments are studied from a constitutional perspective, and in particular the projects of insular or autonomous interest. On them, it points out that they would be unconstitutional due to the "indetermination of the legitimizing assumptions", for jumping over the ordinary planning system and breaking the municipal autonomy. And also, according to the FCM, the opinion considers unconstitutional that these projects are aligned, in some article, with the "ordinances without significant effects on the environment […] for the purposes of submitting them to simplified evaluation".
Expert in law, land, housing and sustainability
Marcos Vaquer Caballería is Professor of Administrative Law at the Carlos III University of Madrid. He is the author of six monographs and more than fifty articles in scientific journals and chapters in collective books. He has taught courses and given lectures at various foreign universities, such as New York (NYU, USA), Pavia and Sassari (Italy), Paris Ouest (France), del Externado (Colombia), the Andina Simón Bolívar (Ecuador) or the Alberto Hurtado and the Católica de Valparaíso (Chile).
He has held the positions of Undersecretary of Housing and President of the Public Business Entity of Land SEPES (2008-2010), Director General of Urban Planning and Land Policy of the Ministry of Housing (2004-2008) and member of the bureau of the UNECE Committee on Housing and Land Management in the United Nations (2006-2008). He has also participated as an expert in several international technical assistance projects of the European Union in Ibero-America (Ecuador: 2014, Paraguay: 1995, 1998) and coordinated between 2006 and 2008 the Spanish focal point of the URBANNET consortium, a European network for the promotion of research on urban sustainability.
