The proposed amnesty law was intended to close all the cases opened by the process, including the most iconic, which led to the conviction of nine of its leaders for sedition and keeps the head of the Government who promoted the independence challenge absconding from Spanish justice. The return of Carles Puigdemont to Catalonia was seen as an almost immediate consequence after the approval of the norm because, although the grace measure could not be fully applied pending the foreseeable resources, the Supreme Court could not at the moment order the arrest of he. But the case opened by the high court against the leader of Junts for terrorism in the Democratic Tsunami case announces a new front with unpredictable consequences and which the PSOE and the pro-independence parties did not count on when, after last summer, the amnesty began to be negotiated.
Pending the final drafting of the law being finalized by the PSOE and Junts to try to protect those accused of terrorism, the step taken by the high court complicates the application of the pardon measure to the former Catalan president. The Supreme Court is preparing to launch a new process before Belgian justice that could last for years, with the intervention of the European Parliament and the community courts.
The instruction of caso Tsunami In the high court it is destined to run parallel to the processing of the amnesty law, but legal sources assure that it will not slow down, nor accelerate, waiting for what happens in Parliament. The case is now in the hands of Judge Susana Polo, designated as instructor in turn of distribution, to whom she has to assume the role that she played in the case. process Pablo Llarena.
What is foreseeable, the sources point out, is that there will be a call to voluntarily declare Puigdemont as under investigation in the coming weeks, an option that is always offered to those authorized to be able to advance in the investigation without having to initially process the request. But it is assumed that the leader of Junts will not attend, which would lead the Supreme Court, if he wants to continue with the case, to ask the European Parliament to lift the immunity of the former Catalan president.
The instruction and its calendar may be affected by the European elections and the decision that Puigdemont makes about his future. If the amnesty law does not give him full guarantees for his return and he remains in Belgium without the protection of the immunity of MEPs, the high court could directly demand his surrender to the justice of that country; But if she maintains the jurisdiction, the instructor will not be able to issue the European order until the European Parliament lifts the immunity. This process, which is carried out by secret vote and which in the cause of the process went ahead with the vote of the majority of the popular, social democratic and liberal MEPs, it would be much more uncertain on this occasion because it is foreseeable that it will not have the support of the Spanish socialist party and that this will drag along social democratic parliamentarians and other groups.
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In the event that the request bears fruit, the Supreme Court could now launch the euro-order mechanism, a procedure designed to simplify the surrender of defendants claimed by a Member State, but which, with the one from the process, is seen as a new ordeal for the high court. The Framework Decision that regulates European arrest and surrender orders excludes terrorism crimes from double criminality control (that the acts are crimes in the country that demands the surrender and in the one that must execute it), which, in theory, accelerates the process, but sources from the high court assume that Belgium is not going to agree to hand over the Junts leader in this way.
The Belgian justice system has been reluctant to collaborate with the Spanish justice system even in cases of ETA terrorists. In the Supreme Court they remember that the courts of that country took more than 15 years to hand over the ETA member Natividad Jáuregui, claimed for the first time in 2004 and whose handover, rejected three times by Belgium, finally took place in 2020 after a tortuous process in which The European Court of Human Rights had to intervene.
Legal sources assume that, if the Euroorder is launched, Belgium will question whether the conduct attributed to Tsunami Democràtic can be considered terrorism. And there the pulse can last forever. The Supreme Court is going to defend that some of the events carried out by that platform fit with the behaviors that the 2017 European directive on terrorism urges to classify as such when they are committed for certain purposes, including seriously intimidating a population or seriously destabilizing or destroy the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country, objectives that the high court attributes to Tsunami.
The Criminal Chamber has put aside some of the episodes that the judge of the National Court Manuel García-Castellón relied on to classify the protests and riots carried out by the platform as terrorism, such as the death of a French citizen at the airport due to a heart attack. of El Prat or the cut of the AP-7 in La Junquera. He does not cite them in the order by which he opened the case against Puigdemont and, according to legal sources, they are not necessary to support the evidence of terrorism. Enough, these sources assure, with what happened the day the sentence of the process (on October 14, 2019) in El Prat and the streets of Barcelona.
In what was experienced that day, the high court believes that there is plenty of evidence to open an investigation for terrorism and defend it in Europe. The “especially serious” injuries suffered by some agents represent, for the Supreme Court, an attack on physical integrity, one of the behaviors classified as terrorism in article 573 of the Spanish Penal Code and in the European directive; The blocking of access to the airport and the harassment of the control tower, “where they wanted to force the air traffic controllers to remain,” is a crime against freedom or illegal detention, according to the Criminal Chamber, which also sees clear indications of serious damage to assets or falsification of documents, conduct also classified as terrorism in the Penal Code when its purposes are, among others, to subvert the constitutional order, disturb public peace or cause terror in the population.
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