🎯 Will Sánchez change criminal law to bring Puigdemont back to Spain?
5 years seems to be a key reference figure.
⚖️ What has changed?
The Spanish government (Socialist Party, Podemos) has admitted that it is “studying” a reform of the crime of sedition, according to statements by the Home Secretary, Fernando Grande Marlaska, and seeking parliamentary support to do that. A Catalan separatist party, Esquerra, has admitted there are “conversations” about that issue. The government, while it negotiates votes to pass the 2023 budget with Esquerra, says it just wants to bring the sentences for the crime in line with its European neighbours.
⛔ So what?
Puigdemont, Marta Rovira and Clara Ponsatí still haven’t come back to Spain after running away to Belgium, Switzerland and Scotland. The Supreme Court still wants to try him for the events of September and October 2017 and his declaration of independence, as it it did in 2019 with Junqueras (Esquerra), Jordi Sánchez (ANC), Jordi Cuixart (Omnium) and the rest. Lowering the prison sentences for sedition in the Criminal Code before they came back would benefit them directly.
🗨️ Key quotes
“Who can trust that law and judicial independence will be fortified by negotiations taking place while the PSOE advances towards “dejudicialisation” alongside the party that, with Junts [Puigdemont], smashed the constitutional framework in Catalonia [in 2017]?” — (El Mundo)
“The pardon decreed by the cabinet in June 2021 for the [Catalan] pro-independence leaders sentenced to jail for up to 13 years was recognition of the political will of the government to lower the tension that Spanish and Catalan society had experienced over the previous years.” — (El País)
💯 Key number: 5 years
Currently, an authority figure found guilty of sedition in Spain can be jailed for up to 15 years. Esquerra wants that dropped to 5 years.
Article 131 of the Spanish Criminal Code sets the statutes of limitations for different crimes, dependent on the length of the jail sentence in question. If the jail sentence five years or less, the statute of limitations is set to…5 years.
2017 + 5 = 2022. Well, look at that, this year. The sedition charge against Puigdemont and the rest would smash into the new statute of limitations.
⛔💰 It won’t be so easy…
Puigdemont can’t come back to Spain for a party just yet. As criminal laywers explain, sedition was not the only crime Catalan separatist leaders were accused of. They were also found guilty of the misuse of public funds and jailed for more many years, on top of the sedition conviction. So unless the government also reforms the sentences for that crime…
🤯 Remember
“Sedition” in the 21st Century Spanish criminal code has nothing to do with the romantic vision of military or popular revolt against the King in adventurous centuries past. It is an offence of rising to stop “by force or outside of legal channels” officers of the law from applying court orders.
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