La normalització lingüística com a títol habilitador de competències. Comentaris a la Sentència del Tribunal Constitucional de 19 d'abril de 1988

Resum

The Constitutional Court sometimes solves correctly competence conflicts without getting into a thorough analysis of all the problems theses conflicts can pose, due to their extreme difficulty. This is the impression we have when reading the Constitutional Court sentence of the 19th April 1988, which ends a positive conflict of competences, number 66/88, brought by the Central Government with regards the Generalitat of Catalonia Executive Council decree law 389/83, of the 15th September, concerning the labelling of products commercialized in Catalonia. In short, the question is to know whether, according to the competence established in article 149.1.1 of the Spanish Constitution, the Central Government can delimited the competence on linguistic normalization that Constitutional article 3.1 grants to the Autonomous Government in relation to article 3.3 of its own Statute of Autonomy. The Court implicitly refuses to consider linguistic normalization as a competence in its proper sense, thus it avoids the real problem and, at the same time, it does not clarify the already confusing and inadequate regulation on multilingual phenomena in the Spanish Constitution and in the Statutes of Autonomy concerned. Nevertheless, the sentence ends up by denying the power of the State decree law to delimited an autonomous competence, because of its lack of minimal formal garantees.