The Supreme Court will investigate the former president of the Catalan Generalitat Carles Puigdemont for terrorism in the Democratic Tsunami case, where the protests and riots that followed, in October 2019, the sentencing of the process. The Criminal Chamber made the decision unanimously this Thursday, and against the criteria of the Prosecutor’s Office, after analyzing the reasoned statement sent by Judge Manuel García-Castellón. The instructor of the case, designated by distribution shift, will be Judge Susana Polo. Puigdemont, on the run from justice since 2017 and leader of Junts, has been negotiating for months with the PSOE an amnesty law that exonerates him, and the rest of the defendants. process, of all the crimes linked to the Catalan independence challenge of the last decade. To them we must now add this new case in the Supreme Court that was not available when the pardon began to be negotiated.
In the order issued this Thursday, the Supreme Court accepts as good the reasons that led the judge of the National Court Manuel García-Castellón to ask the high court to investigate Puigdemont. The Chamber emphasizes that there is “a plurality of indications” that point to the “absolute leadership” and “intellectual authorship” of the former Catalan president in the events attributable to the Tsunami. And he emphasizes that the leader of Junts, far from stopping the platform, “encouraged them to continue in the violent actions that were developed with his knowledge and consent.”
The court also opens an investigation into Parliament deputy Rubén Wagensberg (ERC), but returns to the National Court the investigations into the 10 investigated who are not certified, among them the general secretary of ERC, Marta Rovira. Regarding Puigdemont and Wagensberg, the magistrates conclude that the Supreme Court must take up the case because there is evidence against both and it is “necessary and pertinent that they be called to the procedure, in order to be heard as investigated, with all the rights and guarantees”; Since they are limited, this procedure cannot be done by the National Court.
The Supreme Court’s decision comes when the PSOE and Junts are trying to reach an agreement on the proposal for the amnesty law, stalled precisely due to the disagreements between both parties on how to guarantee the measure of grace for those accused of terrorism. The current wording proposes amnesty all cases of terrorism except those that, “manifestly and with direct intention”, have caused serious violations of human rights (which are death, torture or degrading treatment, according to the European conventions to which the law sends). The PSOE maintains that this text guarantees, in practice, amnesty for those involved in the caso Tsunami, but García-Castellón’s latest rulings indicated that in the case he does see signs of serious human rights violations, which led Junts to fear that Puigdemont would be left out of the amnesty. For this reason, the independence party voted against the rule and forced a new negotiation, whose deadline ends next Thursday, March 7.
The resolution issued by the Supreme Court does not give clues as to whether or not the acts attributed to the former Catalan president would be among those that the law considers non-amnestiable, but the step taken by the high court undoubtedly implies a risk for the application of the measure. of grace to Puigdemont. If there is an agreement between the PSOE and Junts and the law moves forward, its processing will intersect with the Supreme Court’s investigation of the case opened this Thursday. The forecast, according to legal sources, is that the instructor Susana Polo will summon Puigdemont to testify in the coming weeks on a voluntary basis; If, as is likely, he does not appear, the court will have to ask (through a petition) the European Parliament to lift his parliamentary immunity to be able to act against him, as already happened in the case of the process.
The Supreme Court has accepted García-Castellón’s thesis, which considers that the facts studied in the case constitute a crime of terrorism. For the magistrates, the behaviors analyzed in the caso Tsunami fit without “a doubt” into articles 573 and 573 bis of the Penal Code, which classify as a crime of terrorism the commission of a serious crime against physical or moral integrity, or against freedom, carried out to seriously disturb public peace. , or to force public powers to carry out certain actions. The Supreme Court cites a dozen of its sentences on street terrorism that consolidate its doctrine on this crime. “Terrorism is not, nor can it be, a static phenomenon but rather it expands and diversifies gradually and constantly, in a wide range of activities, which is why the democratic criminal legislator in the obligatory response to this complex phenomenon must go “also expanding the penal space for behaviors that objectively must be considered terrorist,” the court notes, citing its own ruling of the caso Country bars2015.
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The Chamber that made the decision was made up of the president, Manuel Marchena, and the judges Julián Sánchez Melgar, Carmen Lamela, Eduardo Porres and Juan Ramón Berdugo. The latter has been the speaker of the order, in which the members of Tsunami Democràtic are attributed with evidence of serious crimes against freedom, physical integrity, attacks and documentary falsifications, and against property. The high court endorses the arguments put forward by the board of prosecutors of the Supreme Court on February 6, when it agreed, by 12 votes to 3, to investigate Tsunami as a case of terrorism, a decision that was later corrected by the lieutenant prosecutor of the high court, María Ángeles Sánchez Conde.
The order also alludes to the 2020 Report of the State Attorney General’s Office (when Dolores Delgado was Attorney General), which spoke of the “violent Catalan independence movement” and expressly pointed out the Committees for the Defense of the Republic (CDR) and the called Tactical Response Team (ERT) for the crimes of belonging to a terrorist organization, possession of explosives for terrorist purposes and conspiracy to commit damage. It was also noted in that Report, the Supreme Court warns, that “within certain sectors of the independence movement, mobilizations progressively increased and outlined the different dynamics, especially through Tsunami Democràtic and the attempts to paralyze the Barcelona airport and the attacks on public and police buildings.” For this reason, the court considers that, “from the outset, the statement that appears in some politicians and the media [de] that only the actions of ETA or Jihad deserve to be treated as terrorism, is incompatible with the definition of terrorism derived from the current article 573. [del] Penal Code”.
“Intellectual authorship”
The order highlights that there is “a plurality of evidence” that proves “functional control of the event, absolute leadership, intellectual authorship and assumption of the reins” by Puigdemont in the 2019 riots. The former Catalan president, the judges say, could have stopped the platform by withdrawing its support, “but far from that encouraged them to continue in the violent actions that were developed with their knowledge and consent.” “In a criminal organization, the men in the background, who order crimes with autonomous command—and can avoid it—can, in this case, be responsible as indirect perpetrators, even when the immediate executors are also punished as fully responsible perpetrators,” he warns. .
The Supreme Court, like García-Castellón, argues Puigdemont’s involvement in the fact that from the beginning he was informed of the constitution of the Tsunami platform, created, according to the court, “for the subversion of the constitutional order and serious destabilization of democratic institutions, preventing to the public powers to comply with their resolutions.” The Chamber mentions the meetings that the former president in the dates prior to the launch of Tsunami and maintains, in line with what was instructed by García-Castellón, that Puigdemont appears “directly involved” in the campaign to publicly promote this platform.
The order rejects the report presented by the lieutenant prosecutor of the Supreme Court, which is what constitutes the official position of the Prosecutor’s Office in this case and which considered that there was no crime of terrorism or involvement of Puigdemont. The court reproaches María Ángeles Sánchez Conde for questioning one by one the evidence provided by the investigating judge “with a subjective interpretation of them” and evaluating them “in isolation”, which represents, according to the judges, an “error ”. “The probative force of the circumstantial evidence comes precisely from the interrelation and combination of the same, which concur and reinforce each other respectively, when all of them rationally point in the same direction,” point out the magistrates, who direct harsh criticism to the lieutenant prosecutor. : “It is not acceptable to analyze each of those elements and give them another interpretation, or to isolate them from the body of evidence by drawing your own conclusions, since the convicting force of indirect evidence is obtained through the set of evidence, proven, in turn, by direct evidence.”
The Prosecutor’s Office of the National Court appeals the sending to Switzerland of the letter that placed Puigdemont as the leader of Tsunami
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The Prosecutor’s Office of the National Court has appealed against the sending to Switzerland of the prosecutors’ letter that placed Carles Puigdemont as the leader of Tsunami Democràtic. The public ministry thus opposes the decision of Judge Manuel García-Castellón that stipulated that the letter from the Supreme Court prosecutors be sent to Switzerland, in which they pointed out that the former president of the Generalitat had led the secessionist movement, a thesis that has not finally been accepted by the high court.
García-Castellón’s decision has been appealed by prosecutor Miguel Ángel Carballo who, together with this judge, has been investigating the case since 2019. Carballo recalls in his appeal that the Supreme Court Prosecutor’s Office has not formally responded to García-Castellón’s request , and asks that an “apocryphal” document, without signatures, “not authenticated or sent through official channels” to the Court not be sent to Switzerland. He makes this warning after learning that the court has requested that this document be translated to send it to the Swiss authorities.
Carballo recalls “the principle of unity of action of the prosecutor’s office, a single constitutional body for the entire State, whose members act as the same person through their own bodies.” García-Castellón decided to send to Switzerland the letter from the prosecutors that linked Puigdemont to possible terrorism crimes within the framework of Tsunami Democràtic after the authorities of that country asked him for additional information to verify if his request “has a political nature,” which, as they pointed out, would prevent them from granting the legal assistance he requested.
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