Ciudadanos has celebrated the Diada by meeting its executive committee in Barcelona, ??where the secretary general and MEP, Adrián Vázquez, has announced that, in his capacity as president of the Legal Affairs committee of the European Parliament, he has sent a letter to the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, to withdraw the act and the “perks” that Carles Puigdemont enjoys.
In a press conference prior to the management meeting, Vázquez defended that Ciudadanos continues to be the “true party of constitutionalists” in Catalonia and that is why he has chosen a date like today to refute from Barcelona, ??as he claims to do. from Brussels, the “lies and the bad image that nationalism wants to give of Spain.”
In this sense, the MEP, who has appeared together with the leader of Ciudadanos en Catalunya, Carlos Carrizosa, has announced that he has sent a letter to Metsola to urge her to apply the Spanish electoral law and withdraw the act of MEPs from Junts per Catalunya Carles Puigdemont, Toni Comín and Clara Ponsatí, who have not met the established requirements to be able to issue their credentials, since they have not complied with the Spanish Constitution.
According to Vázquez, who chairs the Citizens group in the European Parliament, these three MEPs, to whom the Republican Jordi Solé is added in the letter, “fraudulently hold” the position, so their seats should remain vacant in application of the Article 224.2 of the Spanish electoral law and its “perks”, that is, the salary, the right to vote in the plenary sessions of the European Parliament and the budget for the hiring of assistants, should be withdrawn.
“Ten months have passed since the European justice system said that the process to remove the impunity of these MEPs was carried out with total transparency”, recalled the Secretary General of Ciudadanos, for which he announced that he will urge the next session of the European Parliament, which is to be held in Strasbourg, to the application of the law “immediately.” “Their respective seats must remain temporarily vacant until the aforementioned requirement is met, consequently suspending their rights and privileges as members of the European Parliament,” the letter explains.
“We ask the PP (the party to which the Maltese Metsola belongs) to do the same instead of negotiating (with Junts). The only ones who demand that three fugitives appear before the Spanish justice are Ciudadanos”, exclaimed Vázquez, who as MEP, he assured, “will not stop until the three fugitives appear before Spanish justice.”
Vázquez recalled that Puigdemont, Ponsatí and Comín obtained the certificate of MEPs after the 2019 European elections “despite the repeated warnings” they made to the then president of the European Parliament, the Italian David Sassoli, who granted them the certificate. But, as the Secretary General of Ciudadanos has argued, the legal services of the European Parliament “six months ago declared that they had been given the minutes fraudulently.”
Last July, the General Court of the European Union (TGEU) withdrew the parliamentary immunity of Puigdemont, Comín and Ponsatí as MEPs, who announced that they would appeal the ruling before the Court of Justice of the European Union. “The TGUE ruling came on July 5. I don’t know what Mrs. Metsola is waiting for to act,” said Vázquez.
For his part, the president of Ciudadanos en Catalunya, Carlos Carrizosa, thanked Vázquez and the Catalan MEPs Eva Poptcheva and Jordi Cañas for their presence in Barcelona at a time when Catalan politics, referring to Puigdemont’s renewed protagonism, As a result of the importance of the Junts votes in Congress, “it is very present in the European Parliament” and, on a day like La Diada, it has denounced the “nationalist abuse in the face of the passivity or complicity of the Government of Spain”.
In this sense, Carrizosa has assured that Ciudadanos will continue to fight the “three leitmotivs” of Catalan separatism, which he has identified as “the eradication of Spanish” for the sake of “Catalan monolingualism”, “the impunity that they call amnesty” after “misappropriating public funds and everything they did in the unfortunate year 2017” and the threat of a new unilateral declaration of independence (DUI), of which the independence associations have already warned, he has stressed.
“I want to remember that the vast majority of Catalans are not about to let their arms fall before the powerful minority of separatism, which holds political power and public money,” concluded Carrizosa, who has also attacked the socialists for considering an amnesty. which would mean “impunity” for those prosecuted for 1-O in exchange for the votes of ERC and Junts for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez.
