The Supreme Court considers that two of the three magistrates who tried the sovereignist members of the Parliamentary Table chaired by Carme Forcadell were not impartial and orders that the trial be repeated. The Criminal Chamber adopts this forceful decision after upholding the appeal presented by the ERC deputy, Anna Simó, who alleged that she had violated her right to be tried by an impartial judge. In the sentence, now annulled, issued in October 2020, the former members of the Board Anna Simó, Lluís Corominas, Ramona Barrufet and Lluís Guinó were sentenced to 20 months of disqualification.
The Supreme Court resolution focuses on two magistrates: the president of the TSJC, Jesús María Barrientos, and magistrate Carlos Ramos. The resolution, for which the progressive magistrate Leopoldo Puente has been a rapporteur, ensures that both “had already externalized in previous proceedings an explicit stance on issues that later constituted the essential object of the trial.” Specifically, it considers that both magistrates They already anticipated what the meaning of the sentence would be in an order issued in 2017.
In that brief, the magistrates rejected the appeal filed by the defendants against the admission to processing of the complaint filed by the prosecution. In said answer, they dismissed “that the facts denounced (…) are protected by the prerogative of parliamentary inviolability”, which was the main argument of the defenses. The Supreme Court points out that the magistrates had externalized their unfavorable position for the interests of the accused and for this reason they understand that the right to be tried by an impartial judge is not satisfied.
They also highlight that the right to an impartial judge “requires that the members of the Tribunal appear at the trial unaware of any previous position taken on the essential issues that must be discussed there, devoid of any kind of value prejudice. If the metaphor were appropriate: the game must start with the score at zero”. And they give as an example another previous sentence that they handed down in January 2017 in which they highlighted that in the interlocutory resolutions “assessments were made that, although provisional, are substantially the same as those that are typical of a trial on the merits.”
Both Barrientos and Ramos were challenged before this trial of the Bureau was held, but said petition was unsuccessful. Instead, the Chamber did agree to separate them in a similar procedure. Specifically, in the second trial that took place last September against the Parliamentary Bureau chaired by Roger Torrent, considering that, on that occasion, there were doubts about his impartiality. In 2018, Barrientos, as president of the TSJC, abandoned an act in protest in which the president of Parliament Roger Torrent was speaking because he assured that there were political prisoners. For this reason, the room agreed to remove him from the trial against the former president of the Chamber.
The president of the TSJC will form the court, if he has not been challenged before, that will judge the suspended president of the Parliament, Laura Borràs, in a trial in which he will also be the speaker, in the case of alleged fractionation of contracts in the Institution of Catalan Letters .
