You've got to have chutzpah to go to the EU's Foreign Affairs Council and argue that many of the images of police violence during the Catalan referendum were manipulated, that the injured attended to and recorded by the emergency services and the health ministry didn't exist and that it was all part of a pro-independence misinformation campaign. But that's what Spain's foreign minister, Josep Borrell, has just done on the eve of the referendum trial which will put a large portion of the Catalan government and various pro-independence leaders in the dock facing requested sentences which total more than 200 years.
He's not the first to do so: his predecessor, Alfonso Dastis, of the PP, has already tried it. He was scalped by the forums where he did so, especially his encounters with the BBC and the Sky News channel where, live, they responded to him steadfastly, broadcasting their own images of that violent day for the police. Dastis backed down and fell silent but the video went around the world. In a more reduced forum and without images, Borrell has tried it again. It's possible that nobody said anything to him out of politeness but those images put the Spanish police and the violence it used against Catalan citizens in the eye of the storm.
Borrell will make a lot of fuss in Spain with the campaign he's carrying out abroad against the Catalan independence movement. But what happened that day is too close at hand to be forgotten. Never in Europe had anything similar happened against defenceless, peaceful citizens. Many things have derived from those actions, from the king's speech, to employing article 155 of the Constitution and suppressing the Catalan government. Also, the false narrative on which the trial which will start 5th or 6th February is based. The most important trial there's been in Spain in decades and which has raised the interest of the largest international media outlets, bodies like Amnesty International, various NGOs, European Parliaments and members of the legislative chambers of various European countries.
A trial which, on the other hand, will test the level of democracy that exists in Spain. The loss of individual and group freedoms which has been seen in recent years. The dead-end street which the powers-that-be want to lead Catalonia to, powers out-of-control and gathered around shouts of ¡A por ellos! ("Go get them!") and which sees the trial as a chance to crush an ideology and teach a lesson. All very far from justice but much to the liking of Borrell.