Justice obliges the Government to process the request to declare the House of the People a memory space

PalmaA contentious-administrative court has upheld the appeal filed by Amics de la Casa del Poble against the Government's decision to reject the request for the old Casa del Poble in Palma to be registered as a memorial space in accordance with the 2018 Law on Democratic Memory of the Balearic Islands.

According to information provided by the entity in a statement, the ruling annuls the administrative resolution that rejected the request and orders the regional Executive to initiate the corresponding procedure, process it, and issue a resolution on the merits of the matter.

The request had been submitted in November 2021 with the aim of recovering for the collective heritage the space formerly occupied by the Casa del Poble, located at the intersection of Reina Maria Cristina and Manel Sanchis Guarner streets in Palma. The initiators of the initiative argued that this site should be used to build a public facility for the working classes, in line with the values of solidarity and universality historically associated with the labor movement.

The association highlights that the judicial ruling comes just two months after Parliament repealed the Democratic Memory Law on which its request was based. For this reason, they consider that the current debate is not so much focused on whether the Casa del Poble will eventually be registered in the catalog of memory spaces, but on the reasons why the request was not processed when the Government itself had acknowledged in 2023 that it should follow the procedure provided for by the regulations.

"Why has it been necessary to wait for a ruling issued three years after the start of the litigation?", they ask from the entity. Amics de la Casa del Poble also recalls that the Spanish Government's announcement to file a constitutional challenge against the repeal of the law could lead to the recovery of the norm, but warns that this would not automatically guarantee the registration of the old building in the Catalog of Memory Spaces. In this regard, they emphasize that mechanisms such as exchange or expropriation remain available to the regional institutions.

The association has taken advantage of the ruling to call for "reflection" from the political leaders who, in their opinion, blocked the protection of the plot. They consider that the construction of a fairer society requires "restorative practices" and an assumption of responsibility for the decisions made.

Within this framework, they urge the former vice-president of the Government during the last legislature, Juan Pedro Yllanes, signatory of the inadmissibility resolution, to voluntarily assume the procedural costs arising from the judicial proceedings. If he rejects this possibility, they extend the request to those who were part of his team, Jesús Jurado and Marc Herrera, and, ultimately, to the former president Francina Armengol, as the highest responsible for the Executive that adopted that decision. "Externalizing errors onto civil society contributes to increasing political disaffection and eroding democracy," concludes the entity.