Oriol Junqueras, leader of ERC, and Laura Vilagrà, vice-president of the Government, attended yesterday’s Congress plenary to celebrate a “very important milestone”, but returned empty-handed. Junts’ rejection of the Amnesty law completely displeased the Republicans, who on Monday took it for granted that the law would be approved. The anger was concealed in public by Junqueras, who limited himself to lamenting that the law was “good for guaranteeing the end of the injustice of hundreds of innocent people”. But Pere Aragonès, on a visit to Brussels, was the face and voice of concern and stated that we are entering “a risk zone”. “We will have to work so that the law is not put at risk and does not get bogged down forever”, he added.
And it is that a second round for the Amoina Esquerra norm. They believe that JxCat is at a dead end. That no matter how much the opinion now goes back to the Justice Committee, the PSOE will not give in to the demands to withdraw the term terrorism and specify high treason so that those investigated for the alleged Russian plot are not outside the protection of the law .
What’s more, in the republican formation there is the feeling that with this first rejection of the post-convergents to the amnesty, the law is put at risk, no matter how much Junqueras did his best to avoid stating this in statements to journalists at the gates of the congress The party considers that it is unlikely that the PSOE will start everything at will and that the amnesty will not materialize, but “it is still a possibility”.
In addition, as Junqueras expressed, the amnesty law as agreed upon was “robust” enough to “surpass preliminary rulings” in the European courts and “the filters of the Constitutional Court”.
It is not the norm that ERC would have devised to put it in black on white all by itself, but that it is, according to the Republicans, a lost opportunity was also reflected in the words of the spokeswoman Raquel Sans: “What we are playing with the law of Amnesty is too serious to make these flips (…) No amendment will put an end to future judicial inventions. They will exist as long as we exist.”
It also echoed the words of Jordi Turull, general secretary of JxCat, in November, when he boasted of having drafted “half” of a law that met “totally the expectations”.
Also the deputy general secretary, Juli Fernández, spoke in the same sense: “We know that the judges who protect the homeland will continue to invent to repress. We will work until the end to make this law a reality. It’s not a game.”
“Today [judge] García-Castellón and the extreme right wins”, summed up ERC deputy general secretary Marta Vilalta.
The strongest reaction to Junts’ no was expressed by congresswoman Pilar Vallugera. From the hemicycle he called on the post-convergents not to “fall into the judges’ trap”. And he accused them of thinking only of partisan and personal interests: “The amnesty does not go to [Carles] Puigdemont or [Marta] Rovira, but to 1,500 people whose lives are at stake, of the underlying lack of democracy of Spanish justice”.
