The ex-councillor Clara Ponsatí, Junts MEP, returned to Catalonia yesterday after five years and five months in which she lived abroad fleeing justice, and was arrested by the Mossos d’Esquadra in the center of Barcelona. She was subject to a national arrest warrant issued by the investigating magistrate for the cause of the trial at the Supreme Court, Pablo Llarena, for a crime of disobedience.
The Generalitat police took Ponsatí and his lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, to the City of Justice, where a judge on duty was to inform him of his legal status in Spain.
Around eleven o’clock at night, the former councilor received notification of her release with the order to appear before judge Llarena, who is investigating her case, on April 24 and with the obligation to be can be located at all hours, but without limitation of travel.
The pro-independence leader was intercepted in the cathedral square by a group of Mossos d’Esquadra agents dressed in plainclothes just after giving a press conference at the Catalan Association of Journalists. Ponsatí was heading towards the office of the JxCat group of the Eurochamber in Born.
The agent who informed her that she was under arrest, to whom Ponsatí, surrounded by a tangle of cameras, reminded her that she has immunity as a member of the European Parliament and to whom she showed her accreditation, was wearing a jacket that identified her as a policeman. After a few minutes of dialogue between Ponsatí, Boye and the police, the MEP headed towards one of the two patrol cars without a logo that were waiting for her.
During the previous appearance, the MEP acknowledged that her return has now taken place because “the intensity of the persecution”, in her case, “has decreased” due to the reform of the Penal Code. After the entry into force of the legal changes approved by the Congress of Deputies in December, Ponsatí is only being prosecuted for disobedience in the 1-O case.
In this sense, given that in the case of ex-president Puigdemont and also former councilor and MEP Toni Comín Ponsatí the prosecution order does include prison terms, Ponsatí avoided drawing a relationship between their return and an eventual return of the two other leaders. Both remain in Belgium awaiting the ruling of the General Court of the European Union on their immunity, which will be known this spring and can be appealed to a higher instance if it is adverse, to make decisions about their future.
Ponsatí, who has lived in Belgium and Scotland, crossed the Franco-Spanish border without surrendering to the Spanish authorities, unlike what she did back in the day when she returned to Catalonia, from Belgium, the former councilor of the executive by Carles Puigdemont Meritxell Serret, now head of External Action and the European Union. Former CUP deputy Anna Gabriel, who lives in Switzerland, followed this same procedure. For this reason, during the press conference the MEP from Junts was critical of the Government of Pere Aragonès, which she described as a “tool of the Spanish occupation”, and of Serret herself, whom she reproached that now “go around the world” with Spanish flags bigger than the flag, alluding to his recent trip to Colombia.
Thus, the former councilor pointed out that she has not returned to make “a pact with the State, but to continue the fight and to stand up”. “I come to denounce the systematic violation of our rights, the passivity of the Catalan institutions and that the European institutions stop looking the other way”, remarked Ponsatí, who before being arrested warned that the arrest warrant is “illegal” because he enjoys immunity.
“I am a member of the European Parliament and I have immunity throughout the European Union, only in Spain I am not recognized”, said the leader, who also stated that Llarena “is not the competent judge”. “If they arrest me, I will use all legal means to defend my political rights and they will have to face the consequences, as has always happened in Europe”, concluded Ponsatí. The legal services of the Eurochamber are already analyzing his case.
