The judge investigating the case of the ‘trial’, Pablo Llarena, has agreed to issue a national arrest warrant for Clara Ponsatí once the magistrate has found that the former Minister of Education of the Generalitat has not justified with a legitimate cause her failure to appear before the judge to provide an investigative statement for the crime of disobedience for which she is being prosecuted.
After her reappearance in Barcelona since she left the country at the end of October 2017 after the DUI, the judge summoned Ponsatí to notify her of her prosecution and carry out the investigative statement, although she already announced that she would not voluntarily go to the Supreme Court.
The magistrate considers that everything points to the fact that the investigated “has voluntarily and unjustifiably neglected the judicial summons” for which he agrees to her national detention, in order to take an investigative statement, without prejudice to the fact that it can be left without effect if the accused, once who is aware of this decision by notifying the parties, appears voluntarily and personally before the investigator, as occurred with two other defendants in this case, Meritxel Serret and Anna Gabriel.
Ponsatí was personally summoned to appear before Llarena on April 24. The defendant did not appear in the Supreme Court and her defense incorporated a letter in which she stated, as justification for her absence, that the defendant is part of two Commissions of the European Parliament, one of them as a substitute member.
In his auto Llarena explains that, although the aforementioned document did not specify that Ponsatí’s failure to appear was motivated by his attendance at these parliamentary committees, his defense suggested the incompatibility of both tasks.
In the brief, Ponsatí also requested the suspension of the legal proceedings because a procedure to protect the parliamentary privileges and immunities corresponding to Clara Ponsatí had been brought before the European Parliament.
Llarena’s order explains that article 487 of the procedural law contemplates the possibility of converting a summons into detention when the aforementioned does not justify a legitimate cause that prevents him from appearing before the judge.
In the present case, adds the magistrate, the suggestion of the defense that the defendant was unable to attend the judicial appeal cannot be accepted.
On the one hand, because the summons -indicates the judge- was for the morning of April 24, while the parliamentary functions that his defense alleges were scheduled for the afternoon of that date, reasonably compatible by requesting a videoconference or even using existing means of communication between Brussels and Madrid.
Llarena points out that given the advance scheduling of his parliamentary activity and also considering the advance notice with which he was summoned for judicial action, “the defense had a wide margin to warn this instructor of the difficulties of the investigated to attend to her political responsibilities and request the readjustment in the summons that you consider necessary. This provision was evaded and it was decided to present an exculpatory document that has not been followed by any proposal to attend the judicial appeal after April 24.”
It adds that this procedural action allows us to appreciate, in view of the rebellion that the investigated party has maintained during five years of investigation, “that parliamentary functions are nothing more than an excuse for a new neglect of its procedural obligations.”
The instructor affirms that this is what the researcher herself has expressed in various media statements in which “she boasted of having no intention of attending the judicial summons.” And he adds that “this is also the result of the fact that the defendant (who is present in the proceedings and is aware that the investigation of the case is paralyzed due to her lack of investigative statement), not only left our country immediately after her possible intervention in fact, but that he personally opposed the United Kingdom handing it over to the Spanish judicial authorities to answer for the responsibility that is being dealt with in this process”.
Llarena also rejects that the judicial procedure should be suspended due to the existence of a request for protection of parliamentary immunities before the European Parliament.
The judge explains that Ponsatí’s defense is based on a judgment of the Great Chamber of the CJUE that analyzed a different assumption from that of the present case, as the three accusations brought before have reflected in their reports.
On the other hand, the investigating magistrate has issued another resolution that rejects the appeal for reform that Ponsatí raised against the order of March 28 that agreed to her release and, in addition, summoned her to testify at 11 in the morning of April 24 to make an investigative statement before Llarena in the Supreme Court.
