By Josep Casulleras: The Spanish press is already drafting the sentence, and treats the victims of 1 Oct accordingly (3 MAY 2019)

This interesting report on the Supreme Court proceedings against the leaders of Catalonia's independence movement, though several weeks old, is as disturbing as it is fascinating. It is now in English (with permission of VilaWeb and the author).

Click here if need be to access the whole text.


Original source: https://www.vilaweb.cat/noticies/diari-judici-politic-josep-casulleras-premsa-espanyola-testimonis/

OPINION> DIARY OF A POLITICAL JUDGMENT

The Spanish press is already drafting the sentence, and treats the victims of 1 October accordingly

"It's hard to imagine that the court does not think exactly the same way as the Spanish press and Philip VI"

By: Josep Casulleras Nualart
03.05.2019 21:50

Lawyer Ramon Forteza explained on Tuesday afternoon, before judge Manuel Marchena, that he tried to help two young people who had been trapped inside the 1 October polling station in the Department of Social Welfare headquarters in Lleida. Dozens of Spanish riot policemen had surrounded the  polling station, and there were people held inside. Forteza recalled how he tried to enter, and how the police responded to each attempt with baton blows and shoves. He tried four times, even dressed in a lawyer's gown, and he found it impossible: he always received the blows of the agents. In the Supreme Court library, the gathering place for reporters covering the trial against the process, there was laughter. They found it amusing for a stubborn man to be dead-set on helping young people caught in the midst of a group of violent riot poice who, in that same school, were capable of kicking a woman aged about sixty-five who had fallen to the ground. Yes, they found that perseverance, despite the blows, funny. There were also laughter when the Civil Guard officers described the rebellion as a blow to a finger or a look of hatred. The difference is that, on the following day, in the newspapers, some testimonies were completely credible and others were doubted and, in some cases, ridiculed.

The stories told by the first testimonies of voters attacked by the police on 1 October were heart-wrenching. One of them recalled the sound of batons bashing on heads; another described, with such anguish that she could hardly breathe, the unbridled violence of the police at Pau Claris school... But the vast majority of the Spanish press treats these statements as absurd, or with disdain. At best, they present these testimonies as the other side of a dual, contradictory reality impossible to distinguish between, as these people explain things 'that radically differ from the narrative of the police'. It was expressed thus by the El País chronicler in this trial, Pablo Ordaz, who in his previous chronicles had covered the testimony of the civil guards, underlining the ’the hatred of ordinary people' towards the police, without asking how it could be that there were such expressions of hatred or rage.

The hundred-plus police officers that appeared before the Supreme Court delivered a carefully devised discourse, and this was explained in the Spanish press as the demonstration that the behaviour of people during the autumn of 2017 was violent and hostile, not peaceful, that this proved that there was something akin to a rebellion and that the defendants were on a sticky wicket. They disseminated this narrative uncritically, acting as mouthpieces, amplifying lies protected from being refuted with the videos or questions challenging their action. Environmental violence emerged throughout.

In El Confidencial they emphasize the contrast between the testimonies of the police officers and those of the voters, but with 'nuances' that the chronicler makes clear from the outset, which is that 'the agents were enforcing the law.' It remained to be said that people were exercising a fundamental right ad, furthermore, that non-violent protests must not be repressed with that violence by a state that claims to be lawful and democratic. These Spanish newspapers do not even present the conflict; they do not expose the contradiction between the obligation to comply with a  court injunction and the right to express oneself and to protest against that court injunction, which, while we are on the subject, also indicated the need not to break the peace.

The in-depth debate is banished; it is not taken on. The media's reading of this trial is almost unequivocal, because the head of the state made sure it would be from the very outset, barely a week after it had begun. King Felipe VI said: "It is not admissible to appeal to an alleged democracy above the law, because without respect for the law there is neither coexistence nor democracy." The Spanish king reproduced the accusatory narrative of the state prosecutor's office and the state attorney's office... and of the ultraright party, Vox. The Spanish press, with the odd exception, does not at any moment introduce a debate on the exercise of fundamental rights. That is why it interprets a witness such as David Fernàndez as someone who reinforces the prosecutors' thesis, not as an appeal to the court to see if it is capable of protecting the right to protest and to do so peacefully.

Ordaz wrote in El País: 'Fernàndez's testimony unexpectedly becomes a bad business for the defence and a gem for the prosecutor.' He goes on as follows: 'The issue developed more or less well until he got carried away and recognized that he was behind a strategy called a barrier or wall, a human wall'.  In El Confidential, Parera's headline that day said: 'The defence counsels are trying to sow peace in the trial, but they are harvesting sedition '. It couldn't be clearer. It is quite true that David Fernàndez's testimony did not fit in with the testimonial statement strategy of Andreu Van den Eynde, the lawyer of Oriol Junqueras and Raül Romeva, for Fernàndez made explicit the will of civil disobedience, of the action of voluntarily disobeying in defence of inalienable rights.

In the repressive logic in which this trial is framed, the assumption of civil disobedience is synonymous with a conviction for sedition. According to the El Confidencial chronicler, the description of the facts of 1 October made by David Fernàndez before the Supreme court 'coincides, almost word for word, with the text of what in the criminal code is a crime of sedition' . That is to say, that the civil disobedience exercise on that day fits into the 'public and tumultuous uprising to prevent, by force or outside the legal channels, the application of the laws'. The nine defendants accused of rebellion or sedition did not call people to  prevent in a deliberate and organized way the action of the Spanish police; if anything, they urged people to exercise their right to vote, their right of assembly, of protest, of expression. It was the people who left home for the pollung stations to protect the ballot boxes and the voters, organizing themselves, establishing corridors, men and women linked in human chains, others watching out to warn if the police were coming, and all in a reaction that went beyond anything the government could imagine. Is this evidence of a rebellion and sedition by Jordi Sànchez, Jordi Cuixart, Oriol Junqueras, Raül Romeva, Dolors Bassa, Carme Forcadell, Josep Rull, Joaquim Forn and Jordi Turull? Here again is the collision of narratives, of mental framework, that the Spanish press is not willing to accept, and it appears that the seven Sureme Court are not either.

It is hard to imagine that the court does not think exactly the same way as the Spanish press and Felipe VI; it is hard to imagine that this in-depth debate on the right to protest not even being proposed, that this tension be ignored and the testimony of David Fernàndez not to be interpreted as the corroboration of sedition, at the very least. The touchlines of the trial have been very demarcated from the beginning. Outside the Supreme Court, the touchlines are fixed by the Spanish media, who indicate when it is - according to them - unacceptable for the trial to become something resembling an accusatory proceeding against the Spanish police. This is an unacceptable line, for them and for the court, who fixes the touchlines in the courtroom of the old Salesian convent.

They will not allow the trickle of witnesses of 1 October voters there will be for the next two weeks to become 'a trial against the police'. This is very clear in Marchena's mind, and he will limit the witnesses' statements in this regard. It already happened when the judge came down on prosecutor Consuelo Madrigal's side, after she complained that Marina Roig was crossexamining an agent about the violent methods he had used against people in polling stations. This was not relevant, according to Marchena. And this week we saw the judge stop another witness, the mayor of Sant Julià de Ramis, because he accused the Civil Guard, in the description of the events of 1 October that he recalled, of acting in an intimidatory fashion against the population. 

So what use will be all the testimonies that attacked voters will give? For some of the Spanish press, it will serve to mock and humiliate them once again, as the ABC chronicler does when speaking of  'exaggerated and unbelievable versions' that are thought up to 'feed the myth' that will mobilize the people, making a direct comparison with the methods of totalitarian regimes. And How about the seven judges trying political prisoners? Marchena has already said more than once that it is not the aim of this trial to determine whether there were police excesses, as there are judicial procedures open for this reason in several courts in Catalonia. They do not seem to have to take into account that the police violence was calculated to trigger a certain (violent) reaction of the people, and that voters and protesters behaved peacefully. If anything, they will see if they can deduce from these witnesses behaviour that justify sedition, or a conspiracy for rebellion that can be attributed to the defendants. This what the judges are probably thinking, while in the courtroom a gentleman from La Ràpita or a lady from Sabadell stifle their tears to preserve the dignity of their testimony and in the library some journalists burst out laughing.

See list of daily reports:

https://estudiscatalans.blogspot.com/2019/05/here-is-english-translation-of.html