The obstacles that the judges are placing on the amnesty law have led a part of the independence movement to explore ways to speed up its application, especially slow and tedious in the case of the political leaders of the process. Carles Puigdemont, one of the main candidates for the measure of clemency, has opted for hand-to-hand combat. former president and those around them are trying to discredit the judges who are reluctant to comply with the law. Their offensive includes public statements, complaints to the governing body of the judges and even lawsuits in court. Esquerra does not renounce this type of “confrontation” actions either, according to sources from the party leadership, but clarifies that the most effective thing, in the end, is to raise the battery of appeals provided for by the law.
Puigdemont, Junts’ candidate for the regional elections on May 12 in Catalonia, hoped to be present at the investiture session without judicial ties thanks to the amnesty. But at the beginning of July he learned that the investigating judge of the processPablo Llarena, was not going to apply it for the crime of embezzlement for which he is being prosecuted. Llarena also kept the national arrest warrant active against the former presidentwho returned to Catalonia anyway: on August 8, on a day that has gone down in history, he appeared in the center of Barcelona, gave a rally in front of thousands of people and vanished without the Mossos being able to arrest him and without having kept his promise to enter the Parliament.
After his escape, and having returned to his refuge in Waterloo, Puigdemont is a free man, but he has perhaps lost the only opportunity to speed up a pronouncement on the amnesty: his foreseeable arrest and imprisonment would have ultimately forced the Constitutional Court, now with a progressive majority, to rule with some speed on the measure of clemency. From Belgium, the Junts leader has in any case reactivated the head-on clash with the Spanish justice system, a line of action that he has been maintaining since the day after the referendum of 1 October 2017.
Black beast of the independence movement for his instruction of the cause of the processLlarena is the priority target. Puigdemont and the former minister Toni Comín have filed a complaint against him before the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) for the “unjustified delay in the processing” of the defence’s appeals against the decision not to apply the amnesty. They reproach him for having left this matter pending resolution despite having suspended his holidays to ask the Ministry of the Interior and the Generalitat for explanations about the failure of the operation. “He has been informed of the delay up to two times, and has still not dealt with it,” says the document presented by Gonzalo Boye, Puigdemont’s lawyer, the most bellicose against the judiciary. A spokesman for the CGPJ has explained to this newspaper that the document has been registered, but they are awaiting the appointment of the instructor of the file for it to be processed.
Boye, who went up to the stage with a false bottom on which Puigdemont made his speech before getting into a car and disappearing, tries to underline the discredit of the judges. He accuses them of knowingly torpedoing the law just because they don’t like it. And he believes that the best defence is a good attack, although some actions may not have practical effects on the application of the amnesty. The most forceful so far has been the complaint filed against the head of the 1st investigation department of Barcelona, Joaquín Aguirre, who is investigating the so-called “Russian plot” of the process: the alleged connections that the independence movement maintained with personalities close to the Kremlin.
The judge accuses Puigdemont of treason, but also Boye and Josep Lluís Alay, head of the Waterloo office, and refuses to grant them clemency because, in his opinion, “force was effectively used in Catalonia.” The three filed a complaint against Aguirre at the beginning of July for prevarication and embezzlement. They accuse him of disobeying a previous ruling by the Barcelona Court ordering him to end the investigation to “satisfy his capricious desire to save a procedure that was doomed” to be shelved. The High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) must soon decide whether to accept the complaint. Puigdemont does not harbor much hope when comparing Spanish justice to the Sicilian mafia: “The Toga Nostra will always protect one of its own. We will not stop pursuing them as long as necessary.”
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Such public denunciations are also part of the strategy. former president has attacked the instructor of the Tsunami casewhich accused him of a crime of terrorism for his alleged leadership of Tsunami Democràtic, the platform that organized some of the mass protests (such as the occupation of El Prat airport) after the Supreme Court ruling against the leaders of the processin October 2019. In January, Puigdemont accused him of a “persistent violation of the rule of law” and warned (the law was not yet in force) that “without a comprehensive amnesty, which does not exclude anyone, there is no amnesty”. The Tsunami case was ultimately dropped due to a procedural error: the magistrate extended the investigation in July 2021 out of time, which led the National Court to annul everything investigated since then. García Castellón ended up archiving it, so there has been no debate on the application of the amnesty to this case.
The long wait for resources
The debate is indeed taking place in the multiple jurisdictions that deal with criminal and administrative matters related to the processIn Madrid, the same as in Barcelona, although with mixed results. The Supreme Court has appealed the law to the Constitutional Court, while the Court of Auditors has appealed to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Other courts have followed the path of appeal, especially to the Constitutional Court, which means that the effective application of the measure of clemency to all those affected will not be as express as the Government had anticipated. The law gives judges a period of two months to apply the amnesty. That time has already passed and barely a hundred of the 486 people who, according to the calculations of the Attorney General’s Office, may benefit from the law, have been amnestied. The majority are police officers and independence activists, but there are hardly any politicians, despite the fact that the law was initially designed to ease their legal situation.
“We had already foreseen that it would not be easy, that the application would be slow,” say sources from the leadership of Esquerra Republicana, who are nevertheless confident that the presentation of appeals will end up being resolved in favour of the interested parties. “No matter how much noise some people make,” say these sources in reference to the complaints and lawsuits by Puigdemont and his entourage, “in the end the same appeals will end up being presented.” The Republicans do not rule out more far-reaching measures, including complaints or lawsuits, but they consider that “so much noise” is not necessary and that “steps must be taken” to achieve the final objective.
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