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5 de set. 2020

The floundering of Spain's judicial strategy, by Carles Puigdemont et al (16 August 2020)

This is an English rendering (by MS, with improvements by MT: thanks) of an article published in La Vanguardia by exiled Catalan leaders Carles Puigdemont, Clara Ponsatí, Toni Comín and Lluís Puig. If they have any objection, I shall delete it at once.
Click to read the whole post, if need be.
Source:

English translation

The floundering of Spain's judicial strategy

[Spain's] Supreme court is not the competent judicial authority in the cause against the leaders of the independence movement that organised the self-determination referendum in October 2017; this cause led to prison sentences that add up to a hundred years. This is not an opinion; nor is it any longer the thesis of one of the parties in the conflict. It is the decision of the Belgian judicial system when it came to issue its judgment on the case of Lluís Puig, the Minister of Culture in exile. The Belgian jurisdiction, just like the German or Scottish ones, is one in which the political interests and the strategies of the Spanish State to decapitate, liquidate and criminalize the independence movement are of no use. This is one of the reasons why we decided to go into exile: to be able to defend our rights and the rights of the Catalans in a jurisdiction where there were guarantees of impartiality, of independence and, therefore, of justice that we knew we would not find in Spain. All the evidence accrued up to now confirms, on the one hand, that in Europe we would have the opportunity of defending our rights and those of the Catalans, and on the other, that in Spain this was impossible.

The Belgian decision probably caught many by surprise. We understand the reasons why part of Spanish society observes open-mouthed the judicial setbacks that are accumulating outside Spain. It finds no explanation for this. It had been given the electoral promise of our assured extradition. Since the onset of the repression  a constant pattern of propaganda has now grown to a climax, having lasted for decades and through political regimes, whose fundamental aim has been to uphold the narrative hegemony as regards the conquest of the Spanish collective imagination. All this is to impede the slightest risk of empathy that any decent society would develop towards the victims of such flagrant abuses, something that would have resulted in an untenable pressure when it came to to maintaining the State's strategy of the negation and stigmatisation of the [Catalan] independence movement.
 
Anyone wanting to delve in depth into the work we were doing will know that or there is no place for surprises or for the shirking of responsibilities. The narrative power that the State has is huge, and it has managed tosuccessfujlly place in the Spanish collective imagination a series of falsehoods that has been successful. We knew we would never be able to overturn this in the short term, for we neither had the tools or the means of communication to achieve it. Yet we knew that this was a battle that could be won in the mid- and long term. Lies have very short legs. And today, especially after king Juan Carlos I's grotesque disappearing act, the disguises are beginning to drop.We appeared before the press shortly after arriving in Brussels. We informed the Belgian judicial authorities of our addresses and of our willingness to testify, and we did this just a few days later. We have complied with all the conditions that have been imposed on us, and every time Spain has issued a European Arrest Warrant we have chosen not to move to a country with no extradition treaty. Nor is it even true that we fled from the Spanish judicial authorities, as every time that a European Arrest Warrant has been issued against us we have been faced with the action of the Spanish justice system itself. What is more: we offered to testify by videoconference... and they turned this down.

Spain could have taken advantage of the reports of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions of the UN Committee of Human Rights. It had a tremendous opportunity to correct the drift it had entered ever since the State prosecutor-general presented the lawsuit, in an infamous document whose title was The harder will be the fall. It could have done what liberal democracies do, and what the Belgian court has just done: to recognise the authority of the UN Committee of Human Rights and to act in consequence. They preferred to continue obsessed with revenge and exemplary punishment. They pooh-poohed all the international advice that has been reaching them, and they ratified the judicial version of "Go get 'em!", that shameful command* that has imbued the powers of the State, and under which every abuse is allowed them.

The time has come to harvest the fruits that we have been planting for almost three years while they insulted and disparaged us, both politically and personally. Our aim remains intact, we have not caved in. We went into exile to preserve the legitimate Government, to preserve the mandate of October 1st, to defend the collective rights [of the Catalan people] and to defend ourselves from persecution from the only place where we could do so with guarantees. And also to dismantle the judicial farce that was put in place simply in order to liquidate a legitimate, democratic, peaceful, inter-classist, pro-European movement which enjoys widespread support.
 
Our fundamental rights have been violated since the onset of the judicial process, and consciously so. This can only end in one way, and the [Spanish authorities] know it. So they would do well to understand that the sentence which affects Minister Lluís Puig is merely the prelude to a domino effect that can only be avoided if they take the conflict between Catalonia and Spain out of the judicial sphecre as fast and clearly as possible, and relocate it in the political one.
 
* Translators' note: originally voiced by Spanish police and Civil Guards bussed into Catalonia to stop the October 1st, 2017 independence referendum using violent means

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