Advising and reports for the improvement on self-government and autonomic development
In accordance with Decree 122/2000, of March 20th, the Institut d’Estudis Autonòmics works on reports and proposals about:
•The improvement of the self-government and its ways of articulation.
• The support and the coordination of the initiatives for the improvement of the self-government promoted from the Government of the Generalitat, the collaboration and the support in the performances and in the negotiations in front of the state institutions and in mixed organs in which the Generalitat participates to increase its power.
• Legal counselling, follow-up and preventive evaluation of the impact of the state or European law on Catalan jurisdiction.
• The elaboration of studies and proposals about the initiatives promoted by the Generalitat in relation to the development of the autonomy and, especially, of those of basic deployment of the Statute.
These functions are carried out through reports and notes that can request the Generalitat president, the Inside counsellor, Institutional Relations and Participation or the remaining counsellors of the Generalitat. Most of them are about drafts or other non-definite documents in general. The purpose of the reports and notes that are issued by the Institut d’Estudis Autonòmics is to bring juridical arguments, to interpret, to alert or to make proposals about the analyzed texts in order to improve the competences of the Generalitat.
To these tasks, in year 2004 was added the counselling in the statutory reform pioneered by the Parliament of Catalonia, which has been carried out during years 2004, 2005 and 2006, through the elaboration of articulated proposals, documents of analysis and different studies and reports concerning the contents.
Already from year 2006, once approved the statutory text by the General Courts, the Institut d’Estudis Autonòmics started to apply the new power canons to the reports about autonomic development, but has been especially from the approval of the Statute of Autonomy through the organic Law 6/2006, of July 19th, and its entry into force on 9th August of 2006, that the new parameters become mandatory.
In summary, from powers perspective, the reports of the Institut d’Estudis Autonòmics have highlighted the importance of the new functional definitions of the powers that contain the articles 110, 111 and 112 EAC, and they make the accent on the complete character of the legislative authority, of the statutory one and of the executive function of the Generalitat in the exclusive powers and in the fact that only it corresponds to her the exercise of these authorities; in the general rule that the bases have to be principles and they have to be established by rules with rank of law, in the shared powers, and in the incorporation of a statutory authority with external effects, in the case of the executive powers, as well as in the incorporation of the constitutional doctrine about the exercise of promotional activity in the statutory text (article 114 EAC) and about the supraterritorial scope of the phenomena of the powers (article 115 EAC), the recognition of the outer action of the Generalitat as an inherent element to her powers, the participation of the Generalitat in the formation and execution of European law and the statutory promotion of the collaboration with other autonomous communities and with the State.
From the material point of view, it has also been remarked that the Statute of 2006 employs more concrete and precise categories for referring to the different matters of power and he avoids in this way the ambiguities and the interpretative doubts or the limitations that the Statute of Autonomy of 1979 had.
The application and the development of these criteria has been reflected, during year 2006 and first term of 2007, in 31 reports and notes about legislative state initiatives that they have effects in powers of the Generalitat and in 11 reports and notes about autonomic development.
