The judge who instructed the case of the procés in the Supreme Court, Pablo Llarena, has accumulated international setbacks after the successive fiascoes with the European orders and the repeated reproaches against the preventive detention of the defendants raised by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
On this occasion, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, in a resolution published yesterday, considers that Spain violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966 by suspending the rights and duties of parliamentary representation of the former vice president of the Generalitat Oriol Junqueras and of former ministers Raül Romeva, Jordi Turull and Josep Rull,?before they were sentenced. The four politicians, along with five other independence leaders, -all of them in preventive detention at that time- were prosecuted by Llarena in March 2018 for the crime of rebellion, which requires a violent uprising, and in July they were suspended as deputies in application of the Law of Criminal Procedure, which allows the suspension of public officials only when they are accused of rebellion.
The committee considers that the suspension constituted a violation of article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees the right of all citizens to be elected to public office. The ruling underlines that this right “constitutes the essence of democratic government” and, although it recognizes that there may be certain limitations, it considers that the restriction imposed by the Spanish justice system was unjustified. The opinion highlights the fact that finally the four politicians, who filed the lawsuit on December 18, 2018, were convicted in October 2019 for the crime of sedition, which did not involve violence. The committee concludes that “an application of domestic law that, automatically, leads to the suspension of elected positions, for alleged crimes based on public and peaceful actions, prior to the existence of a conviction, prevents an individualized analysis of proportionality of the measure and, therefore, it cannot be considered that it meets the requirements of reasonableness and objectivity”, which, in his opinion, must comply with these restrictions.
“The committee took an important step in affirming that the safeguards against restrictions on political rights must be applied more rigorously if these restrictions occur before, and not after, a conviction for a crime,” Hélène Tigroudja, a member of the committee, said yesterday. .
The decision has more political than legal effects, since the opinions of this committee are not binding, but it is considered that they should be taken into account by the signatories of the pact invoked (including Spain). According to the committee, in this case, its conviction on the merits of the claim constitutes sufficient relief. However, it stresses that Spain “must take all necessary measures to prevent similar violations from occurring in the future.”
Two of the 17 members of the committee disagree with the opinion and insist that the action of the Spanish courts was “reasonable and timely”. José Santos Pais, from Portugal, and Wafaa Bassim, from Egypt, stress that Junqueras and the three former ministers acted against the law and disregarded the decisions of the Constitutional Court. “Their rights were restricted because they resorted to illegal means instead of the constitutional avenues available to reform the Constitution,” the two experts point out. In his opinion, the measure was “reasonable, necessary, proportionate” and “foreseeable.”
