The Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) has left the trial that it repeated this week against former members of the Parliament Bureau Anna Simó, Lluís Corominas, Ramona Barrufet and Lluís Guinó for alleged disobedience when they held their positions under the presidency of Carme Forcadell.
The trial has been a repetition of the procedure for which they were already sentenced in 2020, and it has been done again by order of the Supreme Court (TS) due to the lack of impartiality of two of the three magistrates who tried the case the first time.
Defenses and accusations have maintained the same positions as in 2020 and, with the same arguments, the lawyers Judit Gené and Raimon Tomàs have pursued the acquittal of the accused while the Prosecutor’s Office, the State Attorney’s Office and the popular prosecution of Vox demand that they be convicted of processing resolutions and laws related to the independence process that allegedly disobeyed the Constitutional Court (TC).
Guinó, Simó, Barrufet and Corominas were already sentenced to 20 months of disqualification and a fine of 30,000 euros in a sentence that did not become final, and now they are facing this same sentence request.
The defenses have appealed to parliamentary inviolability and have affirmed that as members of the Board they did not evaluate the content of the proposals they were processing, only their formal aspects, and they have affirmed that they were governed by the Regulations of the Chamber and the jurisprudence on the matter. that they knew until then.
Instead, the accusations consider that the TC gave the Bureau specific instructions that the members of the governing body of Parliament allegedly ignored when processing the 2017 Budget Law, which contained a provision to pay for consultations; to the proposed resolutions of the general political debate of 2016 and to the vote on the disconnection laws on September 6 and 7, 2017.
Among the witnesses, the then senior lawyer of the Parliament Antonio Bayona and the former general secretary Xavier Muro have appeared in the trial, who have told the court that they warned the Bureau that they could incur in breaches of the orders of the TC, while the Former Secretary General Pere Sol declared that the Board “should not analyze the content of the initiatives that were presented”, and clarified that this doctrine evolved later.
The non-independence deputies who were part of the Board chaired by Forcadell, José Maria Espejo-Saavedra (Cs) and David Pérez (PSC), also testified, who criticized irregularities in the expansion of the agenda to vote on the referendum law and in the voting on the conclusions of the study commission of the constituent process.
