Oriol Junqueras, leader of ERC, and Laura Vilagrà, vice president of the Government, attended the plenary session of Congress this Tuesday to celebrate a “very important milestone”, but they returned empty-handed. Junts’ rejection of the Amnesty law has completely upset Republicans, who on Monday assumed that the law would be approved. Junqueras hid his anger in public, who limited himself to lamenting that the law was “good for guaranteeing the end of injustice for hundreds of innocent people.” But Pere Aragonès, visiting Brussels, has been the face and voice of concern and has stated that he is entering “a risk zone.” “We will have to work so that the law is not put at risk and it does not run aground forever,” he added.
And a second round for the norm worries Esquerra. They believe that JxCat is at a dead end. That no matter how much the ruling now returns to the Justice Commission, the PSOE will not give in to the demands of withdrawing the term terrorism and specifying high treason so that those investigated for the alleged Russian plot are not left outside the protection of the law.
What’s more, in the republican formation there is a feeling that with this first rejection by the post-convergents of the amnesty the law is put at risk, no matter how much Junqueras tried to avoid stating it in statements to journalists outside Congress. In the party they consider that it is unlikely that the PSOE will send everything away and that the amnesty will not materialize, but “it is still a possibility.”
Furthermore, as Junqueras expressed, as the amnesty law had been agreed, it was “robust” enough to “overcome the preliminary rulings” in the European courts and “the filters of the Constitutional Court.”
It is not the rule that ERC would have devised to put it black on white itself, but it is, according to the Republicans, a missed opportunity. It has also been reflected in the words of spokesperson Raquel Sans: “What we are at stake with the Amnesty law It’s too serious to hit the steering wheel like this (…). No amendment will put an end to future judicial inventions. They will exist as long as we exist.”
He has also echoed the words of Jordi Turull, general secretary of JxCat, in November, when he boasted of having drafted “half” of a law that “fully met expectations.”
The deputy secretary general, Juli Fernàndez, has also spoken in the same sense: We know that the salvapatrias judges will continue inventing 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 win”, summed up ERC deputy general secretary Marta Vilalta.
The most forceful reaction to Junts’ no was expressed by congressional representative Pilar Vallugera hours before. From the chamber she demanded that the post-convergents not “fall into the judges’ trap.” And she accused them of thinking only about partisan and personal interests: “The amnesty is not about (Carles) Puigdemont or (Marta) Rovira, but about 1,500 people who have their lives in question, about the lack of underlying democracy of justice Spanish”.
