The table of the Investigation Commission on abuses in the Church of the Catalan Legislative Chamber has sent this Friday to the Parliament Table a request to submit to the Prosecutor's Office the non-appearance of Archbishop Juan José Omella, as a witness. The senior leader of the Spanish Episcopal Conference has twice refused to offer his testimony before the deputies and, in the letter in which he informed that he would not attend, he made reference to the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court that he considers exempts him from attending and to which They have hosted in the past, in other commissions on different issues, senior Government officials, such as former President Mariano Rajoy himself or former Vice President Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría.
The president of the commission, Susana Segovia (En Comú Podem), had already warned at the beginning of the week that, if Omella did not respond to the commission's second call, she would consider taking the case to the Prosecutor's Office, as established by the regulations. of the camera. In its article 68, which regulates these commissions, it establishes that public officials are obliged to appear, but witnesses are not. Many of those mentioned ignore the call and the file ends up in the Prosecutor's Office, which ends up archiving them.
In the first letter in which he expressed his refusal to appear before the Parliament, Omella recalled that the Constitutional Court established, in a 2016 ruling, that the chambers are not responsible for “carrying out a legal qualification of the facts investigated” nor are they responsible for carrying out out “imputations regarding the authorship of illicit behavior.” Segovia has decided to transmit to the Parliamentary Committee the decision on whether to appeal to the Prosecutor's Office and now it will be the highest body of the Chamber that will make the decision. There the PSC has two votes and at the time it was already against Omella giving testimony.
The commission has been active since November 2022 and several victims and witnesses of abuse cited by the same groups have passed through it. Omella, in the two letters in which she has declined to attend the commission, has also repeated the argument that the Church has already provided help in investigating the abuses; for example, providing data to the report that the Congress of Deputies commissioned from the Ombudsman in March two years ago.
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