Spain and the Council of Europe 40 years later: Democracy and the Rule of Law

Resumen

In 1977 Spain joined the Council of Europe after the end of the dictatorship. This paper will try to give a vision of those forty years through an analysis which falls into three parts: the first will highlight the main features of Spain's accession to the Council; the second part will focus on how the standards of the Council of Europe have become an integral part of the Spanish legal order; and, finally, it will analyse the challenges and increasingly complex situations in recent years, particularly the recent opinion issued by the Venice Commission on the reform of the constitutional law in Spain. It will focus on democracy and the rule of law rather than on the protection on human rights.