According to the PNV leader, "a ruling cannot be allowed to overturn a statutory decision adopted by a referendum of the people of Catalonia. The legitimacy of the decision of the citizens of Catalonia cannot be unknown or ignored.  The Constitutional Court should not have got involved".

"And it is not a minor and trivial matter as the Spanish government would have us believe. We believe that the CT ruling has stripped bare fundamental aspects of the Estatut. The court has done away with numerous areas that affect, fundamentally, symbolic questions (national identity, language, institutions) and self-government aspects (organisation, bilateral relations, participation in state authorities, jurisdictions, investments and financial matters,...) from the Estatut approved by the Catalan people, after it had been cut back by the Spanish Parliament," he stressed.

According to Urkullu, "the statutory and constitutional agreements have been made meaningless. We believe that this ruling reinvents the limits of the constitutional model (its symbolic and jurisdictional boundaries) for the self-government of the Catalan, Gallician and Basque nations, and the Court has even overruled a statutory decision ratified by the Catalan people".

Finally, he added that "the ruling reflects the crisis of the constitutional model for the self-government of the nations within the State. We have a dire experience with the breach of the Gernika Statute of Autonomy and the "slammed door" that the Spanish Parliament shut in the face of the project to reform the Basque Statute, approved by an absolute majority of the Basque Parliament".