Thursday, March 28

The Supreme Court orders to repeat the trial for disobedience to the Parliamentary Table for lack of impartiality of two magistrates

The Supreme Court has ordered a repeat trial against the members of the former Board of the Parliament of Catalonia for allowing the processing of the independentist disconnection laws. The Catalan Superior Court of Justice sentenced them to one year and eight months for crimes of disobedience and the Supreme Court understands that two of the magistrates were not impartial and that the trial must be repeated. The convicted were Lluís Corominas, Anna Simó, Ramona Barrufet and Lluís Guinó while Mireya Boya’s acquittal is firm.

The Supreme Court understands that their right to an impartial court has been violated because two of the magistrates of the Catalan TSJ who tried and sentenced them “had already externalized in previous proceedings an explicit position on issues that later constituted the essential object of the trial”. The Supreme Court explains that the two challenged magistrates have a “proven professional career” and that their initial position “could have been modified in the face of new arguments or circumstances” but that, in any case, they must be removed from the new trial.

The Superior Court of Catalonia decided, now more than two years ago, to impose sentences of 20 months of disqualification on four former members of the Table, after the Supreme Court broke up the cause of the process and decided that they should be tried in Barcelona. The judges attributed a crime of disobedience to them and, in addition, forced them to pay fines of 30,000 euros while Mireya Boya, a deputy for the CUP, was acquitted for not having the capacity to intervene due to the position she held then outside the Board of the Catalan Parliament.

Anna Simó, who led this appeal with this argument about the lack of impartiality of two magistrates, explained that in several cars in which the judges had rejected appeals, they had already made their position on the case clear. The Supreme Court acknowledges that in those proceedings the judges already understood that the defendants had disobeyed orders “timely communicated by a competent body”, that the admission to processing of proposals by the Board “was not covered by the Regulations” of Parliament or that the facts They were not protected by parliamentary immunity, matters that should have been resolved for the first time in the sentence and not in pre-trial proceedings.

It was not the first sentence of disqualification that judges signed against members of the Board or political leaders for the parliamentary aspect of the Catalan independence process of 2017. Joan Josep Nuet was sentenced to eight months of disqualification for supporting some of these agreements that, among others things, facilitated the processing of disconnection laws. Part of the conviction of Carme Forcadell, then president of the Catalan chamber, was based on declaring it proven that the Constitutional Court personally notified all the members of the Board of its warnings not to continue with the independence offensive.

Those orders prior to the prosecution of the case, for example, said about the Constitutional orders that “the judicial mandate previously and formally communicated to the defendants does not seem obscure, inconcise or imprecise.” Something that, for the Supreme, should be part of the arguments of the sentence and not of an order issued before the deployment of evidence in the trial.

The “pills” of the cars

In its sentence, the TSJ of Catalonia reproached the convicted for disobeying the Constitution with “personal, conscious and voluntary decisions, encouraged by a certain political ideology freely and legitimately shared by all of them” without any type of “influence, neither external nor reciprocal ”.

The Supreme Court recalls, for example, the recent setback of the European Court of Human Rights against the Spanish Justice for the trial against Arnaldo Otegi in the Bateragune case, annulled due to the lack of impartiality of one of the magistrates of the National Court. “It explains that the existence of impartiality can be analyzed according to a subjective criterion taking into account the personal convictions and the behavior of a particular judge,” writes the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court judges review the sentence of their colleagues from Barcelona and understand that a good part of the arguments used to condemn the defendants for disobedience “already appeared, as a “pill”, script or tight summary, contained in the order” March 2017 signed by two of the magistrates. “All these decisions constitute practically a script or preview of the matters that were also addressed in the final sentence.”



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