Supreme Court orders trial for jailed Catalan separatists
(25/10/2018) Will the Spanish government try to reduce the charges? Will Quim Torra really try to trash Catalonia after a guilty verdict?
On Thursday, the Supreme Court ordered a trial for 18 Catalan separatist leaders, including the nine still in jail on remand, but not including Carles Puigdemont, Carla Ponsatí and five others considered fugitives from justice abroad. They would be tried separately were they ever to return to Spain, a court spokesman confirmed.
The nine include Oriol Junqueras (Esquerra, ERC) with whom Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias met last Friday to talk about parliamentary support for the central government’s 2019 budget. Mr. Junqueras and the other 17 will be tried for different combinations of rebellion—which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in jail—the misuse of public funds and contempt.
The trial date will not likely be set for another month or so.
The First Minister of Catalonia, Quim Torra, reacted with his now habitual threat that if the court convicts them of those crimes, separatists will bring chaos to Catalonia again, like they did on October 1 and 3 last year: “A trial has been ordered against more than two million Catalans who voted on October 1”.
Significantly, both the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the Deputy Prime Minister, Carmen Calvo, have said since yesterday that they do not believe a charge of rebellion will stand up to scrutiny at trial; not that they are judges. While the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the private prosecution brought by Vox will lodge accusations of rebellion, the Attorney General’s Office might only ask for a charge of sedition.
The Popular Party has adopted a harsher stance this week, with Pablo Casado accusing the Prime Minister in parliament yesterday of taking part in the “coup” against the state alongside the separatists. Relations between the two have officially been broken off.
As the trial unfolds over the next few months, there will once again be tremendous tensions between independence supporters who believe the accused are innocent and should never have been sent to jail on remand in the first place, and those who, at the other extreme, believe, like the Popular Party’s new leader and many other political leaders and commentators, that they should be locked away for a very long time for trying to force the separation of Catalonia from Spain.
That is what the rule of law is all about. That is why we have courts and lawyers and judges and appeals. So far, under the Spanish criminal law system, the investigating judges believe there is at least a case to answer at trial.
Mr. Torra, cheered on via Twitter and Skype by Mr. Puigdemont from Belgium and their coterie of camera-loving defence lawyers, will continue to tell the world Spain is a Francoist oppressor state whose democracy is not worthy of the the 21st Century, especially when international media interest is rekindled by the trial.
But unless they try to organise the once much rumoured but ultimately impotent Catalan Spring, a Maidan or Tahrir Square in Barcelona, it will just be more empty rhetoric. They did not even lower the Spanish flag on Catalan government HQ last year. How many independence supporters will be up for confrontation and chaos this winter, when that is precisely the reason the separatist trial is taking place at all?