As reliably as a Swiss watch, Spanish justice always steams in quickly to remind us that the repression against the Catalan independence movement is far from finished and that it plans to apply the same template to all the cases it has open and that this will last for many more years. This Wednesday it was the turn of the High Court of Catalonia, which announced that it is going to put on trial a large part of the parliamentary Bureau from the last legislature for having allowed Catalan MPs to debate the right to self-determination of Catalonia and whether king Felipe VI should be reprimanded after the Supreme Court verdict on the Catalan political prisoners. Thus, those who at that time led the pro-independence majority in the Bureau, Roger Torrent (speaker), Josep Costa (deputy speaker), Eusebi Campdepadrós and Adriana Delgado (members) will have to respond to a demand from the public prosecutors for them to be banned from office for 20 months (for the first three) and 16 months (for former MP Delgado, who only participated in one of the two votes).
As there is already the precedent of the Bureau that governed the agenda of the Catalan chamber between 2016 and 2017 and ended with bans from office-holding of similar length to the sentences now being requested ―with the exception of the speaker Carme Forcadell, who was sent to jail for eleven and a half years for sedition― the script for the denouement of the trial seems, once again, to have been written ahead of time. The judicial machinery is relentless and shows that for those who drive it there are no stops foreseen in the confrontation between Spain and Catalonia. They take their time, but they thus make it clear that the current situation can only be resolved with an amnesty law, as the 3,000 people still facing retaliation will sooner or later suffer the same fate.
Putting this amnesty at the forefront of Catalonia's democratic demands —without renouncing self-determination— is a good test of fire to dispell an idea that is firmly established in many of the foreign embassies in Madrid, where one always hears the same thing: "Well, Pedro Sánchez has given dialogue a chance and lowered the tension with Catalonia." It is even difficult to unpick this impression, as the Spanish prime minister has installed this mindset with the total acquiescence of the media and the establishment. It seems fine to them and if they have to burn some energy, they will dedicate it to protecting the king with embarrassing documents like the letter from his father Juan Carlos I informing him that he will mantain his residence in Abu Dhabi even if he visits Madrid regularly. For football fans, a good comparison for Sánchez and the dialogue issue would be that of the legendary Barça coach Helenio Herrera, who in 1959 coined the expression "win the match without getting off the coach".
The decision to seat the former Catalan parliamentary speaker and three other ex-Bureau members in the dock is the other side of the same coin which saw the cases against Juan Carlos I closed by the anti-corruption prosecutors. The fact that everything explained to us in that latter prosecution resolution ends up as, for one reason or another, a dead end, does nothing but reaffirm that not all citizens are equal before the law. Not equal in the slightest: some are shown the way on a red carpet while others face a path of thorns. And moreover, just in case there was not already enough shamefulness contained in the letter of the former king, we have now been told - only 48 hours after it was made public - that it was agreed on between the royal palace and the Spanish government and that the exiled monarch only had to sign it. Sánchez, meanwhile, says the explanations are of the emeritus are inadequate. Of course they are. But what have you done about it, prime minister?