Puigdemont a Sardenya Foto: Albert Salamé / VWFoto
Written by Jordi Oriola Folch
When the Catalan independence movement, after unsuccessfully trying to reach a consensus with the Spanish state on a referendum on self-determination, organized a unilateral referendum in 2017, the Spanish government remained unwilling to engage in dialogue and to seek a political solution. Spain sent 10,000 police to Catalonia to prevent the referendum by force and then fraudulently used the judiciary to prosecute and convict pro-independence supporters for non-criminal acts in order to make them abandon their pro-independence ideas and their struggle.
That is why it was so important for the pro-independence supporters to defend themselves judicially outside Spain. The President of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, who had organized the referendum in 2017, went into exile in Belgium with members of his government, because they were sure that they would not have a fair trial in Spain. The Spanish justice system has tried to get Belgium to hand them over through the almost automatic mechanism of Euro-surrender orders between EU countries. This has meant that the exiled Catalan politicians have led a very strong fight to prevent the surrender orders and to show that Spain would try them with sentences decided in advance.
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For the time being, the struggle of the Catalan pro-independence exiles (who have also been elected members of the European Parliament during this time) has succeeded in having Euro-arrangements for their surrender denied by the Belgian, German, Scottish and Italian courts because of the risk that they would be judged unfairly. Also the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has admonished Spain in a report of 06/13/2019 (1), as well as the Council of Europe has admonished Spain in Resolution 2381 (Cilevics report) of 06/21/2021 (2) and in the report of Marija Pejcinovic of 06/10/2022 (3).
But for the moment, the greatest success that the struggle of the Catalan exile has achieved has been that on 02/31/2022 the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg has responded to some preliminary questions formulated by the Spanish justice, in which it protested the fact that Belgium had denied the European arrest warrant for the surrender of the Catalan politician Lluís Puig exiled in this country. The Luxembourg Court responded that Spain could issue Euro-warrants and that Belgium, in a normal situation, should accept them, but clearly stipulated that, although Spanish justice does not have a generalized systemic failure (as Hungary, Poland or Romania have), it could have a systemic failure due to the fact that Lluís Puig belongs to an Objectively Identifiable Group formed by pro-independence Catalans.
The future sentence of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg could, based on the present sentence, certify that the Catalans are a national minority that does not have fair trials in Spain (5): with prison sentences to 9 people, with the repression of 4,200 Catalans (700 with open court cases), with the illegal spying through Pegasus, with the infiltration of police within the peaceful Catalan social movements…
At some point, it will have to be contemplated that, in order for the Catalan national minority to be able to guarantee the protection of its identity, its centenary institutions and its linguistic, cultural and social integrity, and to be recognized the full right to govern itself according to its way of conceiving the democratic game (which is different from Spain’s way), the solution would be the exercise of the right to self-determination and the creation, within Europe, of a new state of the Catalans.
