The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which brings together 47 countries, dealt an historic blow to Spain and its Supreme Court on Monday afternoon as it demanded the release of the pro-independence political prisoners, the withdrawal of the European Arrest Warrants seeking to deliver exiled president Carles Puigdemont and his ex-ministers abroad to Spanish justice, the demand that Pedro Sánchez's pardons also include the crime of misuse of funds and not only sedition, and an end to the wider judicial persecution of the Catalan independence movement. The vote of the parliamentarians in the Council of Europe was categorical: 70 votes for, 28 against and 12 abstentions, and nothing the Spanish deputies could do to stop the ship from sinking.
The Spanish judiciary, the senior judiciary, which sent an SOS to Pedro Sánchez last Friday through its professional associations when the writing was already on the wall, has not been pardoned by the Council of Europe. The ridicule in Spain, politically speaking, is guaranteed and the comparison with Turkey humiliating and something which should make the Spanish authorities reflect. That only 22% of deputies in the Assembly rejected the report - the three Spanish parties of the right and the PSOE were travelling on the same train - and aligned themselves with the Spanish positions, is an example of the true weight of Spanish diplomacy. Brand Spain will need more money to plug the huge breach that has been opened, however much the Spanish media - also certain Catalan media - get to work, like any other crewmember, to bail the water out of the ship and reduce the importance of the news story.
It is easier now to understand Sánchez's desperate move this Monday in Barcelona. What he wanted to present as a gesture of mercy from his government with the nine political prisoners jailed in Lledoners, Puig de les Basses and Wad-Ras is nothing more than a European-imposed correction in response to the bulldozing of a democratic and majority movement in Catalonia. Europe, the European institutions, have been slow to react - to Spain's great satisfaction and to the exasperation of the independence movement. The Council of Europe, which defines itself as a regional-level international organization aiming to promote, through the cooperation of the states of Europe, the configuration of a common political and legal space on the continent, based on the values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law, has made its decision and it reaffirms the old axiom that no justice is possible until you get across the Pyrenees.
The overwhelming clarity of the vote highlights two things, which are two sides of the same coin: in a European organization in which 47 states have official representation, very few countries believed that the actions of the Catalan independence movement in 2017 deserve the terrible sentences they received from the Supreme Court. Secondly, Spain's quest to defend its territorial unity at all costs, with violence and via sentences such as those of the Supreme Court, which has been clearly shown up, has been corrected.
Pedro Sánchez came to the Liceu to play a role in front of Barcelona's pro-Spain establishment, always so eager to listen to promises and so forgetful when it comes to demanding their compliance, and to talk about magnanimity, clemency and re-encounter. All very pompous and empty, as is usual in the Spanish prime minister. No proposal, no proposed self-correction. He has irritated the right and given encouragement to those who were already convinced. He has deceived everyone and solved nothing. He has put up a wall against an amnesty and referendum and gained time. This last part, gaining time, and weaving magic with words, is what he does best. Without hesitating for a moment, he joined with Mariano Rajoy in imposing article 155 on Catalonia in 2017 and aligned himself with the revenge sought by the most undemocratic Spain - and now he presents himself as the champion of democracy.
As for the last words of his speech dedicated to Catalans - "we love you": it is not that they are terribly cheesy, but rather that they have no value as long as the repression does not stop and the police and judicial persecution of the independence movement is not abandoned.