The sovereignist deputies of the Parliamentary Table chaired by Carme Forcadell have argued before the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) that they have “more than” complied with the penalty of disqualification imposed on them in 2020 by the laws of the process and that the Supremo annulled last November.
In the Catalan high court, the new trial for disobedience against the deputies of Junts pel Sí (JxSí) Lluís Corominas, Anna Simó, Ramona Barrufet and Lluís Guinó who made up the Parliamentary Table chaired by Forcadell, began on Tuesday, after the Supreme Court order to repeat it due to lack of impartiality of the court that tried them in 2020.
The TSJC sentenced the four deputies to a sentence of 20 months of disqualification for a crime of disobedience to the Constitutional Court by allowing the processing of the laws of the 1-O referendum and legal transitoriness, which the Parliament approved in the tense sessions of on September 6 and 7, 2017.
The trial has begun with the same previous questions that were already raised in the one that was held in 2020: the defenses have once again insisted that the JxSí deputies were protected by the principle of parliamentary inviolability, without the Table being able to curtail the debate policy proposed by the groups.
But Judit Gené, a lawyer for Corominas, Barrufet and Guinó, has introduced a new element into the debate by defending that her clients, already separated from the political front line, have already more than complied with the disqualification sentence imposed on them in 2020 and that prevented them from presenting themselves to any electoral call.
“The effects of the annulment of the previous oral trial have caused serious harm to my clients,” denounced the lawyer, who believes that the mitigation of undue delay should be applied to the defendants because the Supreme Court took more than a year to resolve that it should repeat oral hearing.
Gené has argued that, once they were sentenced to 20 months of disqualification, the electoral law prevented deputies from attending elections “of any scope”, with which the penalty for disobedience is more than settled.
In fact, the lawyer recalled that the disqualification sentence that the Supreme Court imposed on former Minister Meritxell Borràs, whom she herself defended in the process trial, was extinguished in June 2021, when the high court had not yet ruled on the case of the Table.
Faced with the arguments of the defense, the lieutenant prosecutor of Catalonia Pedro Ariche has reasoned that it was not the accusations that have led to the repetition of the trial, but the defenses when presenting their appeals against the sentence handed down in 2020.
In addition, he has stressed that if the Supreme Court has taken two years to resolve the appeals against the conviction of the Parliamentary Board, “it is not because it has filed the case on a shelf”, but because of the delays caused by the recusal incidents presented by the defenses.
The repetition of the trial against the sovereignist members of the Roundtable in the Forcadell stage is due to the Supreme Court resolution that last November annulled the sentence for the lack of impartiality of the magistrates Jesús María Barrientos -president of the TSJC- and Carlos bouquets.
The Supreme Court concluded that both had expressed an explicit position on key issues in the case in proceedings prior to the trial, for which reason it forced the hearing to be repeated with a different court, which today is made up of judges Fernando Lacaba, Francesc Segura and María Jesús Manzano. .
