The pro-independence trial has begun | While …

PageI12 in Spain

From Madrid

On February 12, at 10:21 am, in Spain, the country's Supreme Court opened an oral trial that will try twelve separatist leaders for the attempted secession of Catalonia in 2017. The judicial process is considered another of the same importance in the country, such as the one who tried the leaders of the military coup of 23 February 1981 or the famous GAL case, which had tried in 1988 the leaders of the Spanish Ministry of the Interior for its role in the clandestine repression of the terrorist group ETA.

The procés, popularly called to the process of independence seeking that the forces of the sovereignty of Catalonia have pushed in recent years through the governmental institutions of this autonomous community, has dominated the politics of Spain in recent years. years.

On Sunday, the three main opposition forces, the People's Party, Citizens and Vox, gathered tens of thousands of people in Madrid to reject the negotiations that the Spanish government, led by Socialist Pedro Sanchez, had with the president of the country. the Republic. The Catalan Generalitat, Quim Torra, is trying to establish a dialogue that channels the sovereign demands in the respect of the legality of the country.

This Wednesday, it is the same independent forces in Catalonia that will decide the fate of Pedro Sanchez when the National Congress will consider the draft general budgets presented by the Socialist Government. Negotiations between the Spanish executive and the Catalan government implied the possibility that the sovereign parties support the state accounts, as was the case in May 2018 when they supported the motion of censure which had leads Sanchez to the palace of Moncloa.

However, the differences in recent days in the figure of the rapporteur, or the mediator, who would participate in the dialogue sponsored by the government, aroused the fury of the opposition who called for a protest and led to the end of negotiations in the during the meeting. an evening. With the broken bridges, the president of the Generalitat, Quim Torra, baderted that he would approve the general budgets of the state only if the negotiations provided for the possibility of a referendum of the year. 39; determination. Sanchez replied that his government would never allow this consultation and that, if the national accounts were not approved, it would trigger early elections.

The referendum on independence is one of the central events that will judge the trial of the trial over the next three months. The seven magistrates who make up the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court, presided over by Manuel Marchena, must decide whether, during the consultation process of 1 October 2017, declared illegal by the Superior Court, the crimes of rebellion, sedition or embezzlement. To prove it, the Attorney General's Office and the People's Prosecution, represented by the right-wing Vox party, must demonstrate that during the key days of the referendum and the following, when declaring unilateral independence, the elements of "violent uprising" or "tumultuous".

The state bar, which depends on the Ministry of Justice, involved in the trial because the trial has used public funds for its activities, has filed a complaint for sedition and embezzlement crimes. The difference in penalties established by the Penal Code between rebellion and sedition can vary between 5 and 15 years.

During the first day of the judicial process, the defense of the twelve accused coincided, with some dissenting nuances, in which the Supreme Court was not impartial and was a "political trial". Oriol Junqueras, a lawyer of the president of the Generalitat, one of the leaders likely to face more years in prison, said that "the cause is against the right to protest and against political dissent". The lawyer of Jordi Cuixart, president of Omnium, one of the NGOs who took an active part in the process, claimed that the trial was a collective defeat of Spanish society and that he should not have started with a clear reference to the solution of the problem. The crisis in Catalonia should be resolved by politics and not by the courts.

In this sense, Miguel Pasquau Liaño, magistrate, professor of law and Spanish novelist, says that "the prosecution could have been avoided but that, for one reason or another, the courts were seized". However, "it is necessary that a sentence be pronounced to clarify from a legal point of view what will be the reaction of the State to a secessionism fueled by the governmental institutions themselves, and this differs from what the It was known, terrorist secessionism of ETA "

Indeed, the clarification to which Pasquau Liñao refers refers to some sort of political speech. Since the intensification of the process involving a large part of the Catalan population, the country's political forces have used Catalan sovereignty as a central element of their electoral campaigns. The most notable example of this trend is the emergence of Vox, an ultranationalist party that, shaking the specter of the Spanish divide, has managed to reach the power of an autonomous region in less than a year since his public appearance.

"While it is true that new parties have emerged with their nuances, Citizens, we can, and now Vox, the truth is that, as the issue of national unity, autonomy and self-government is a very sensitive issue, the interim solutions are erasing, and we are returning to a two-sided confrontation between two blocks, one on the right and the other on the left ", said Pasquau Liaño.

Although the trial is just beginning, the main opposition leaders have not stopped referring to the judicial process. Some 500 witnesses are expected, including former Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, Mayor of Barcelona Ada Colau, or independence deputies Joan Tardà and Gabriel Rufián. The leader of the Popular Party, Pablo Casado, said that "the lawsuit against the worst blow to the state of democracy since 23 F" was launched, while Albert Rivera, President of Ciudadanos, has suggested that the Socialist Party may forgive sovereignty leaders if they have been sentenced by the Supreme Court.

For its part, the government of Sanchez decided to focus on what was happening in the precincts of the National Congress, a few blocks from the Supreme Court, where the debate on general budgets was unfolded in the morning. Although it seems obvious that the differences between the Spanish executive and the sovereign forces will leave the national accounts in the air, it is not excluded that the political dialogue may bring some surprise. This despite the message that led to the start of the trial, and pointed out the great political badyst, Iñaki Gabilondo: "When justice has finished speaking, the problem will be there, in the expectation of politics."