Former Minister Clara Ponsatí, Junts MEP, returned to Catalonia on Tuesday after five years and five months in which she has lived abroad fleeing from justice, and was arrested by the Mossos d’Esquadra in the center of Barcelona. On her weighed a national arrest warrant issued by the investigating magistrate of the cause of the process in the Supreme Court, Pablo Llarena, for a crime of disobedience.
The Generalitat police took Ponsatí and his lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, to the Ciutat de la Justícia, where a judge on duty was to inform them of their legal situation in Spain.
Around 11 at night, the former minister 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 reachable at all times, but without limitation of their movements.
The pro-independence leader was intercepted in the Plaza de la Catedral by a group of Mossos d’Esquadra agents dressed in plain clothes just after giving a press conference at the Col legi de Periodistes de Catalunya. Ponsatí was heading towards the office of the JxCat group of the European Parliament in El Born.
The agent who informed her that she was detained, to whom Ponsatí, surrounded by a tangle of cameras, reminded that she has immunity as a member of the European Parliament and to whom she showed her accreditation, was wearing a jacket that identified him as a mosso. After a few minutes of dialogue between Ponsatí, Boye and the police officer, 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 prosecuted for disobedience in the 1-O case.
In this sense, given that in the case of former president Puigdemont and also former minister and MEP Toni Comín Ponsatí the indictment does include jail terms, Ponsatí avoided drawing a relationship between his return and an eventual return of the other two leaders. Both are still 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 adviser to the executive of Carles Puigdemont Meritxell Serret, now holder of Foreign Action and the European Union. The former deputy of the CUP Anna Gabriel, who lives in Switzerland, followed the same process. Therefore, during the press conference, the Junts MEP 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 for now “going for the mundo” with Spanish flags bigger than the flag, in reference to his recent trip to Colombia.
Thus, the former minister pointed out that she has not returned to make “a pact with the State, but to continue the fight and to stand up.” “I have come to denounce the systematic violation of our rights, the passivity of the Catalan institutions and to stop the European institutions from looking the other way,” stressed Ponsatí, who before being arrested warned that the arrest warrant is “illegal” because it enjoys of immunity.
“I am an MEP 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 they have always done in Europe,” concluded Ponsatí. The legal services of the European Parliament are already analyzing her case.
