Artur Mas’ lawyer, Xavier Melero, has publicly and privately apologized to his client for his mistake before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in not presenting the observations that the court based in Estabourg asked him to analyze his claim. against the sentence of disqualification of the former president of the Generalitat for a crime of disobedience for the organization of the independence referendum on November 9, 2014. Last week, the ECtHR dismissed Mas’s complaint against Spain for that reason.
“I have made a mistake, I have sinned from pride and I apologize publicly,” Melero acknowledged on RAC1, where he admitted that he is very touched by it. “I have had better days,” he summarized. The lawyer explained that the former president of the Generalitat accepted his apology and added that “25 years of services provided satisfactorily were not going to waste because of an error of this type.”
In line with this, Melero said that Mas asked him if something could be done because his will has always been to “continue and take this to the ultimate consequences.” To do this, both considered the possibility of presenting a complaint to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, the only instance that would remain; “even if it was to achieve a symbolic recognition that President Mas was right.” “We will do it,” confirmed the legal representative of Mas, at the time a talk show host for the station and a contributor to La Vanguardia.
Melero has acknowledged that the court gave him the procedure to respond to the State’s allegations in the complaint, but at that time he considered that he had already made them with the complaint itself and that he should not carry out the procedure. “There is a minority jurisprudence that agrees with me, but I should have responded to this procedure,” argued the lawyer, who expressed surprise at the ECtHR’s decision to dismiss the complaint. A surprise that he already showed to this newspaper at the time.
For Melero, the court, despite his failure to comply, could have resolved, since when the court summoned him to carry out the procedure, it used the conditional to indicate that if he did not answer, it could be considered that he had withdrawn from the lawsuit. “I thought that the court would not consider it that way,” argued Mas’s legal representative. However, Melero has admitted that he received two warnings, as the ECHR explained in its writing last week.
The fifth section of the ECtHR, in a resolution taken on April 14 and communicated last Thursday, decided to eliminate the lawsuit from its list of cases after the legal representation of Artur Mas did not respond to its two requests for observations, an attitude that He took it as a give-up.
“I know that I have some public relevance thanks, in part, to President Mas. And, in addition to the apology in private, he had to make it in public,” Melero justified himself.
In his lawsuit, Artur Mas questioned whether his sentence met “the requirement of clarity and predictability” contained in Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which establishes that no one may be convicted for an action that – at the time it was committed – does not constitute an infringement under national or international law.
The former Catalan president maintained that the warning that the Constitutional Court gave him before November 9, 2014 “was not sufficiently precise, concrete and categorical regarding the prohibition of carrying out the consultation” and questioned whether it had a “criminal” nature, as he recalls. the ECtHR.
Three years later, in 2017, the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) sentenced Mas to two years of disqualification from public office for having disobeyed the warning of the Constitutional Court regarding the 9-N consultation, organized with public funds. about a possible future independence of Catalonia.
In 2018, the Supreme Court reduced the sentence imposed to one year and one month of disqualification. But, later, he took his case to the Constitutional Court, where he presented an appeal for protection that was rejected. Thus, the former president exhausted all national avenues, which allowed him to bring the matter before an international court such as the ECtHR, which finally rejected it.
