From the lectern of the Chamber of Deputies, with the debate already underway, the Junts group has warned that for now it will not vote in favor of the Amnesty law in the plenary session of the Lower House, although it has left the door to continue negotiating until the last minute and to speed up the deadlines, as already happened in the debate of the first Government decrees two weeks ago. “We will exhaust every last option to continue [negotiating],” highlighted Miriam Nogueras, spokesperson for the party in Madrid, who she considered just before that “stopping repression halfway is not stopping it.” “We cannot participate in leaving the Catalan independence movement exposed to the arbitrariness of the politicized Spanish judicial leadership,” she assured.
Thus, the leader of the JxCat in Congress has demanded that the PSOE accept her transactional amendments, an option that the socialists do not view favorably for now. In particular, an agreement between the post-convergents and the PNV that, in the opinion of Junts, would provide coverage for all the independentists who believe that they could be left out right now. “By excluding the terms of terrorism and treason, what we do is not embarrass Europeans by trivializing terrorism, as prevaricating judges do,” Nogueras highlighted.
At the outset, following the same line of argument that the amnesty does not forget any case, Nogueras has stressed that criminal forgetting must be “comprehensive.” “An amnesty that leaves no one behind,” he added. “The text is a good starting point and it would be even more so in a full democracy without interference, but you know that the law has holes where the prevaricating Spanish justice system can leave the amnesty on empty paper,” stated the JxCat leaders.
Likewise, he has regretted that in Ferraz they do not move after seeing how there are judges who “synchronize” the judicial agenda with the political agenda. As an example, Nogueras has given the fact that Judge Joaquín Aguirre reactivated yesterday, just one day before the vote on the norm, the cause of the Russian plot of the process or the activity of Judge Manuel García Castellón in the National Court, issues that socialists have already criticized. Nogueras, in fact, has asked to “fight” those magistrates.
“If we can take the ball away from them, why do we put it on the penalty spot?” he questioned. “The adaptation of the judicial agenda to the political agenda is so blatant that there is no need for arguments,” continued Nogueras, who believes that “the Government should show all its authority in the face of unacceptable acts [of the judges].” “On the other hand, it seems that [the Government] gets carried away by aesthetics and headlines,” he lamented.
With these wicks, Junts assure that they are willing to overthrow the law if necessary and consider that leaders of the process could now be left out of the measure. Sources from Carles Puigdemont’s party detail that they do not want what happens with the reform of the crime of embezzlement, which for the leaders of 1-O has had no effect after the interpretation of the courts. These sources also point out that they are willing to run the risks of European justice overturning some points of the norm if their transactions are accepted. “They do not accept amendments because they are afraid of what European justice will do, they are afraid of European justice,” said the JxCat leader. “We assume all responsibility,” Nogueras added right after.
Precisely, that is one of the warnings that the socialists formulate when rejecting the amendments and that has also been heard with small mouths from the leaders of Esquerra Republicana, which is willing to approve the current law, in recent days. “A selective and deferred amnesty is not what was agreed upon. It is not an aesthetic debate, it is a real debate,” concluded the Junts spokesperson.
In the final part of his speech, Nogueras raised the tone by pointing out that the PSOE “are not prepared to break with Francoism.” “With a Francoism that you know is installed in many State institutions and that it depends on your will to eradicate them, today they are coming for us and tomorrow they will come for you.
Those of Jordi Turull believe that after García-Castellón’s latest movements the law may not protect those investigated for terrorism, such as Puigdemont and Marta Rovira and almost thirty other people. The reactivation of the Voloh case by Judge Aguirre, in turn, has put JxCat even more on alert. In the party they fear that the judge will cling to the exclusion of the amnesty for crimes of high treason due to alleged links with Russia. In his opinion, the amendment that the Nogueras group negotiated with the Jeltzales last week would provide greater protection for the application of the amnesty. In addition, the party maintains other demands on the table, such as that the period of application of criminal oblivion starts one year earlier, on November 1, 2011, so that the Court of Auditors’ cases are completely amnestied. In the supervisory body the investigation period starts earlier than in the courts.
In the event that the report of the presentation is overturned, this is the wording of the law, which came out of the justice commission last week, the text would return to that body before it is addressed again in the plenary session of the Lower House . Said commission, if necessary, would have a period of one month to redraft the law with the initial text, so that the political debate would return to the starting point.
