The place and status of the Basque Country (Pais Vasco) in Spain remains the thorniest issue in contemporary Spanish constitutional law and politics. In general, this issue has been confined to the political arena but, in November 2003, the Spanish government sought the intervention of the Constitutional Court by bringing an action against the Basque government’s plan for a new Statute of Autonomy for the Basque Country. By Order of 20 April 2004 the Constitutional Court declared the action inadmissible. This note describes and comments upon that Order. Spain’s seventeen autonomous communities and two autonomous cities already enjoy a limited but effective right to self-government, by virtue of the current Spanish Constitution, which enshrined a new model for the state: The Estado de las Autonomias (literally, ‘‘state of autonomies’’) lies somewhere between a true political federation and a state made up of regions and governed with a degree of administrative decentralization. The Constitution came into effect in 1978 through a referendum that received broad support throughout the nation, attracting the requisite majority of votes for its approval. In the Basque Country as in the other autonomous communities, the majority of votes cast were in favor of the Constitution, but the abstention rate was very high. This lack of enthusiasm was perhaps because the Estado de las Autonomias did not offer the degree of political autonomy that some Basque political forces had wished for. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, tensions remained high in the Basque country, where they were exacerbated by the terrorist activities of the Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA, Basque Fatherland and Liberty), and in Catalonia, where there were political parties also demanding a greater degree of autonomy