The Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) has refused to remove its president, Jesús María Barrientos, from the trial for the preparations for the 1-O of three ERC officials, concluding that his criticisms of the amnesty law do not affect his capacity to judge nor do they raise doubts about their impartiality.
This is what has been agreed by the judge of the civil and criminal court of the TSJC in charge of ruling on the recusal of Barrientos that was requested by the leader of ERC Josep Maria Jové, which was joined by Lluís Salvadó -current president of the Port of Barcelona- and Natàlia Garriga -current Minister of Culture-, who will be tried from April 10 for embezzlement, prevarication and disobedience for their role in October 1.
The judge, in accordance with the criteria of the Prosecutor’s Office, has refused to remove Barrientos from the trial, who alleged that his statements did not contain any allusion to either the facts or the people who were going to be tried and denounced the “imaginative theory” that led Jové’s defense to the “artifice” of attributing to him a personal conviction of the criminal nature of the acts that will be tried.
In an event on February 26, Barrientos stated that a law that “privileges a few over the entire citizenry” can never be used as an “element of pacification, but rather of discord,” as in his opinion demonstrated by the debate on the amnesty law, which could end up affecting the cause of Jové, Salvadó and Garriga.
“No one, no person, entity or organization, no matter how powerful it claims to be and even if it hides behind votes, is above the Law,” said Barrientos, who pointed out that it must be applied “without spaces of impunity,” which would compromise their general character if they are used “for the exclusive benefit of some.”
The defense of Jové, current president of the ERC parliamentary group and who faces the highest penalty in the trial, seven years in prison and 32 years of disqualification, requested the recusal of Barrientos considering that, with his criticisms of the amnesty law could have incurred a “loss of objective impartiality.”
On the contrary, Judge Núria Bassols highlights that in this case there is “no evidence of real doubts about the lack of impartiality” on the part of Barrientos in judging this case, since her opinion on a law being processed “cannot be understood as the affectation of the person who issues it to judge facts that may be related to said norm.”
The judge, who emphasizes that the causes of recusal must be interpreted in a “restrictive” manner, points out that in this case “not a minimum of evidence of a lack of impartiality” on the part of Barrientos has been detected.
For the judge, the statements of the president of the TSJC, although they can be understood as an opinion contrary to the approval of the amnesty law, do not allow us to intuit that there is an interest on his part in the outcome of the trial of Jové, Salvadó and Garriga.
“It can be understood that whoever is going to be subjected to a criminal trial suffers from the maximum impartiality of those who must fulfill the exquisite function of judging, but not any manifestation related to the amnesty law can be interpreted as a symptom of direct interest or indirect in a cause,” the order highlights.
The judge specifies that Barrientos himself stated in his writing in this recusal procedure that in his statements he made no reference to the facts or the people who will be tried and “much less about their guilt or innocence,” even though the defense of Jové “has developed” an “imaginative theory that leads him to the artifice” of attributing to him a conviction of the criminal nature of the facts prosecuted.
“These conclusions of the party can only be reached from pure voluntarism, since they lack any rational connection with the public demonstrations that I may have made on this or any other occasion,” Barrientos specified in his argument.
