Official Gazette, Issue 24 App. (a) on 14 June 2012 5 based on a ruling on the constitutionality of the text of Article 38 of the Constitutional Declaration. This plea is denied, since the judicial supervision of the constitutionality of laws and regulations exercised by the Supreme Constitutional Court in accordance with the text of Article 49 of the Constitutional Declaration, and the Law of the Court issued by Law No. 48/1979, has its general basis in the principle of the legitimacy and the sovereignty of the law and the subordination of the state to the law. On this basis and in accordance with the ruling of this Court, excluding political actions from the scope of this judicial supervision is denied, based on the fact that the nature of such actions cannot be subject to litigation, and the criterion for determining the legal character of such actions is by the nature of the action itself and not the characterizations that the legislator may attribute to it – when its nature may be inconsistent with such characterizations. This is because excluding such actions from the competence of the constitutional judiciary is rather meant to further political considerations that – due to the nature of such actions and their close linkage to the political order of the state or its domestic or international sovereignty – must be kept outside the scope of judicial supervision in order to preserve the state, defend its sovereignty, and uphold its higher interests. This requires that the body undertaking such actions – whether the legislative or executive authority – be given a wider range and broader scope of discretionary power to act in the interest of the nation and its safety, and not entrust the judiciary with the power to review measures taken in such matters, because examination and review necessitate information, controls, and scales of assessment that are not available to the judiciary, and it is not appropriate to raise such issues publicly in its forum. The Supreme Constitutional Court alone is entrusted with examining the nature of the issues regulated by the appealed provisions. If these provisions are political actions, then they fall outside the Court's competence to conduct judicial supervision of constitutionality; if they are not, then the Court is free to oversee them. For this reason, and because the appealed provisions organize the stipulations governing running for office in the People's Assembly, which must be examined alongside the rest of the stipulations of the aforementioned Law No. 38/1972, in so far as they are interwoven and interconnected to form an inseparable whole, and in light of the fact that said stipulations specify the nature, framework and content of the legal system adopted and enacted by the legislator to regulate the entire electoral process, which according to its legislative nature and aforementioned content is not among the political issues that fall outside judicial supervision over constitutionality. This Court's exercise of judicial supervision over the constitutionality [of these provisions] is not an infringement of, or challenge to the text of Article 38 of the Constitutional Declaration, or an extension of its supervision over them, so this text and the rest of the other provisions of the Constitutional Declaration remain the rules governing this supervision. The plea to the jurisdiction of the Court to examine the case does not rest on a sound basis, and so must be denied. Whereas the motion by the State Cases Authority that the case not be accepted in order to unify the venue of the merits case and the constitutional case is also denied, since it is established that the jurisdiction of this Court is only connected with the case in so far as it corresponds to conditions fixed by Article 29 of the [law establishing the Court]. Hence, to realize the legislator's intention in this matter, the merits case must rely solely on petitions other than the ruling that certain legal provisions are

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