The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court has unanimously agreed to declare its jurisdiction and open a case to investigate and, where appropriate, prosecute the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont – current MEP – and the deputy of the Catalan Parliament Rubén Wagensberg for terrorism crimes in relation to the facts investigated in the Democratic Tsunami case.
The High Court adopts this decision after analyzing the reasoned statement submitted by the judge of the National Court, Manuel García Castellón, in which he explained the evidence that in his opinion proves the participation of the two accused in the events investigated.
The magistrates thus ignore the report sent last week to the High Court by the lieutenant prosecutor of the TS and number two in the Prosecutor’s Office, María Ángeles Sánchez Conde, in which she requested that the case for Puigdemont be filed, considering that the judge is based on “mere conjectures” to make him responsible for the coordination or leadership of the platform that led the riots in the protests over the sentencing of the process in October 2019. In turn, Sánchez Conde thus avoided following the majority criteria of the Board of Prosecutors, which They did consider that there were indications to investigate the leader of Junts for terrorism.
The court, made up of the president of the Chamber, Manuel Marchena, and the judges Julián Sánchez Melgar, Juan Ramón Berdugo (speaker), Carmen Lamela and Eduardo Porres, concludes that with respect to these two accused, both outside the reach of Spanish justice , it is “necessary and pertinent that they be called to the procedure, in order to be heard as investigated, with all the rights and guarantees provided for in our legal system. “Investigative diligence that cannot be carried out by the instructor, but only by this Second Chamber because they are authorized.”
In an order, notified today, it also declares the lack of jurisdiction of the Chamber to instruct and, where appropriate, judge the other 10 people investigated who are not certified as the inseparable unity of behavior that the Chamber itself requires to accept competition with respect to non-certified.
The court has no doubt that the acts attributed to Tsunami Democràtic fall within the crime of terrorism and includes at least a dozen sentences of street terrorism that consolidate its doctrine on this crime. In this sense, the order indicates that “the morphology of the actions prosecuted, in their external aspect, there is no doubt, coincides, with particular accuracy, with that of those frequently carried out for years in the Basque Country, by violent groups articulated in a more or less stable.”
The order focuses on the events that occurred on October 14, 2019 at the Prat Airport and indicates that Tsunami Democràtic responds to “the fight to combat” the sentence of the process “by conveying to international public opinion the obvious injustice of the resolution and organizing violent acts to prevent its compliance.” “Puigdemont was the president of that Government and was, and continues to be, a fugitive from justice, avoiding prosecution by this Second Chamber,” he points out.
The text explains that the facts that are likely to be subsumed into crimes of illegal detention in the blocking of the entrance and exit to Barcelona’s Prat Airport by a crowd of people gathered with false plane tickets and boarding passes. He adds that “international aviation service and airport services and air traffic were disrupted. Access to users and crew was prevented and the airport control tower was isolated, where they wanted to force the air traffic controllers to remain, with the idea of ??causing the paralysis of the airport and the massive suspension of flights, in a situation of absolute chaos and violence in which T.D. Acting with perfect coordination and wearing balaclavas that covered their faces, they used dangerous instruments and devices of similar destructive power to explosives, such as fire extinguishers, glass, aluminum sheets, fences, metal carts or luggage racks, which they threw at the agents of authority.”
For the Court, especially serious injuries were also caused to members of the State Security Forces, caused by dangerous substances and pyrotechnic devices. “Injuries subsumed, in principle, some of them in art. 149 CP and that would be in ideal competition with crimes of attacks on law enforcement agents, caused with dangerous instruments, perpetrated at the Prat airport and in the streets of Barcelona, ??by throwing stones, paving stones, aluminum sheets and bars of iron against the agents, in the midst of the formation of barricades, burning of flammable drums and containers”.
Furthermore, it considers that massive and continuous falsifications of plane tickets and boarding passes were carried out by the organizers of TD’s strategic action to ensure that a large number of people had irregular access to the T1 and T2 facilities. from El Prat airport.
And, finally, it also considers as serious crimes of continued property damage to public property or public use of special gravity and with the use of flammable pyrotechnic substances, caused at the airport and streets of Barcelona.
The Supreme Court explains that to prove the crime of street terrorism, it is required that one of the following purposes be carried out: subverting the constitutional order, seriously disturbing public peace, seriously destabilizing the functioning of an international organization or provoking a state of terror in the population. or in a part of it. For the Chamber, the behaviors analyzed fit into articles 573 and 573 bis that regulate these crimes and points out that, in summary, it can be stated that article 573 of the Penal Code considers the commission of a serious crime against physical or moral integrity, or either against freedom, among other legal rights, carried out to seriously disturb public peace, or to force public powers to carry out a certain action, such as a crime of terrorism.
“Well, in our case, the members of the TD movement have committed serious crimes against freedom, physical integrity, attacks, falsifications of documents, assets and others that have already been included in the first section of this document.” , emphasizes the court, which takes the opportunity to reproach the public statements of some politicians and the media in the sense that “only the actions of ETA or Jihad deserve to be treated as terrorism”, which “is incompatible with the definition that of terrorism is derived from the current article 573 CP.”
The order also indicates that there are several indications that would prove Puigdemont’s participation in the events and refers to the fact that from the beginning he was informed of the constitution of Tsunami.
The resolution mentions the meetings in which he was present in the dates prior to the launch of the platform and recalls that Puigdemont appears directly involved in the campaign to promote it.
The Chamber points out that in this case “that plurality of evidence accredits functional control of the fact, absolute leadership, intellectual authorship and assumption of the reins of the typical action, in such a way that it could have avoided the injury to the legal asset and the course of the iter criminis , withdrawing his charismatic support, but far from that he encouraged them to continue in the violent actions that were developed with their knowledge and consent.”
He adds that “in a criminal organization, the men in the background, who order crimes with autonomous command – being able to avoid it – can, in this case, be responsible as indirect perpetrators, even when the immediate executors are, likewise, punished as fully responsible perpetrators.”
He reasons that “the mediate perpetrator of this assumption dominates the execution of the act, using an entire apparatus of organizational power that functions from the top, where criminal orders are designed, planned and given, to the material executors of them, but not before passing such orders through the intermediaries who organize and control their compliance.”
The Supreme Court has appointed Judge Susana Polo as instructor of the case according to the established shift.
