The crisis open to the Public Prosecutor’s Office due to the case against Carles Puigdemont for terrorism had its colophon yesterday with the final report that calls for the investigation to be definitively archived, which would leave the former president of the Generalitat free to be amnesty as soon as the law is approved, currently in parliamentary processing.
The lieutenant prosecutor of the Supreme Court and number two of the Attorney General of the State has set the final criteria of the public ministry regarding the role of the leader of Junts in the platform Tsunami Democràtic (TD), responsible for the riots in Catalonia after the sentence of process in October 2019. María de los Ángeles Sánchez Conde has concluded that the judge of the National Court Manuel García-Castellón is based on “mere conjectures” to attempt to initiate a formal investigation against Puigdemont.
The prosecutor believes that there is not a single indication that certifies that the former president had anything to do with the organization, impetus and even less leadership of TD. In his letter, number two of the Attorney General’s Office avoided assessing whether the actions of the Tsunami, like the riots at El Prat airport, can be classified as terrorism, regardless of Puigdemont’s involvement.
Sánchez Conde believes that the High Court must assume jurisdiction because Puigdemont is limited by his status as an MEP, and then agree to file it, because there are no indications to justify the start of an investigation . Now it is the Criminal Chamber of the High Court, presided over by Manuel Marchena, that has the last word.
Several options are open to the court. It is good to attend to the fiscal criterion, or to accept the reasoned presentation of the instructor of the National Court, or a third option, which is to return the case to García-Castellón so that he can continue to collect evidence before a new referral to the Supreme Court.
This affair has generated a political and judicial crisis. In the parliamentary sphere, the irruption of this cause has forced a renegotiation of the Amnesty law by setting the current text of the bill as excluding terrorism crimes. Both ERC and Junts feared that this article of the law was an open door to prevent both Puigdemont and the general secretary of the Republicans, Marta Rovira, from being granted amnesty. In fact, the lack of agreement between Junts and the PSOE on this particular point made it difficult to approve the law at the end of January, which is now stuck in the Justice committee pending a new vote in Congress.
In the judicial sphere, specifically within the Public Prosecutor’s Office, it has also caused a schism. The public ministry, led by Álvaro García, has made several baptisms. The Prosecutor’s Office of the National Court defended that there was no terrorism in the TD case, but public disorder and, therefore, it had to be investigated in the ordinary courts of Barcelona. In addition, he saw no evidence against Puigdemont. His judgment had to be reviewed by a Supreme Prosecutor, in charge of issuing a report on competence after García-Castellón’s decision to send it to the High Court. This prosecutor, Álvaro Redondo, endorsed his colleague’s opinion. However, his report went to the Board of Supreme Prosecutors to study it. A large majority overturned their judgment and agreed that there was clearly a crime of terrorism in the events linked to the TD, with enough evidence of Puigdemont’s leadership in the creation and launch of this platform to destabilize the State and attack social peace
In this achievement of facts, one last report remained to set the definitive criterion. The Prosecutor’s Office already warned that Sánchez Conde, as the chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court, should not follow the line of the Board, as it has been.
In this latest report, the lieutenant prosecutor states that García-Castellón is limited to raising hypotheses “without a factual basis”. Sánchez Conde notes that “in reality we are faced with mere conjectures or suspicions that do not allow the attribution of any criminal act to Puigdemont, not even with the provisional nature of the present procedural moment”. indications, neither examined in their specific significance nor – as it should be – taken in their entirety, allow us to reasonably infer the participation of the accused in the Democratic Tsunami platform, they seem, rather on the contrary, to rule out the aforementioned intervention”, concludes the prosecutor.
