The legal case of the procés explodes again on the political board. Now in full negotiations for the formation of the Congress Table and the future Government, in which Carles Puigdemont’s party is a fundamental piece, since Pedro Sánchez needs their votes to be sworn in. The Holiday Chamber of the Constitutional Court, with a conservative majority -unlike what happens in plenary session with a progressive majority-, has agreed on an unprecedented decision: not even to admit an appeal for amparo related to this special cause. Specifically, one presented by the former president of the Generalitat and his former minister Toni Comín.
Puigdemont and Comín intended with this appeal to exhaust in the Constitutional Court the judicial channels to annul the arrest warrant in national territory that weighs on both, after the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court refused to do so. After the reform of the Penal Code with which the crime of sedition was repealed, the examining magistrate of the case, Pablo Llarena, agreed to the search and capture and imprisonment of both as alleged perpetrators of two crimes of disobedience and aggravated embezzlement.
Now the Holiday Chamber of the Constitutional Court has rejected for processing —by two votes to one— the appeal against the arrest warrant issued by the Supreme Court against Puigdemont and Comín for disobedience and embezzlement. Conservative magistrates César Tolosa and Concepción Espejel defend that the urgency to resolve is due to the fact that Puigdemont and Comín had requested precautionary measures that should have a prompt response once the matter entered the Constitutional Court on the last day of July. That is to say, they understand that there was no waiting despite the fact that none of them is in Spain to be arrested.
The Constitutional decision, which has a particular vote that questions the “hasty” and “unnecessary” way in which the resolution has been taken, prevents the plenary session from debating the intention of the former president and former minister to annul their orders national detention. Until now, all the appeals on the cause of the procés had been automatically admitted for processing to later be debated in the Plenary of the Court.
The signatory of the dissenting vote, the progressive Laura Díez, questions the urgency with which the Vacation Chamber has resolved, since neither of the two appellants is in Spain, both can carry out their representative functions outside the country and are not in this moment deprived of liberty.
“There is no particularly urgent circumstance in relation to the eventual granting or denial of precautionary measures that justifies the action of this Chamber. Therefore, I do not share the rush to decide on a matter that could well have been processed after the summer break following the ordinary system of distribution and resolution of matters in the Constitutional Court”, criticizes Diéz.
For the progressive magistrate, the decision should have been for the Constitutional Court to admit the amparo appeal of Puigdemont and Comín to be fully advocated for its resolution, since the legal issue is still open at the European level. This would allow the High Court to take a position on a legal issue of “obvious constitutional significance” given the still absence of doctrine in this resource that transcends the specific case.
