With the decision by the Belgian prosecution service to present no appeal to the Ghent Court of Appeal on Tuesday afternoon, the case of the Mallorcan rapper Josep Miquel Arenas Beltrán, better known as Valtònyc, is closed. After four years in exile and 1,460 days of uninterrupted struggle, Valtònyc has won and has vanquished the Spanish judiciary, which has lost another legal process in European courts. In his case, due to the very essence of his profession as a musician, Valtònyc's victory is doubly painful for Spain, as it states that his case was exclusively one of freedom of expression - the Spanish Supreme Court had convicted him 2018 to three and a half years' jail for glorifying terrorism and insulting king Juan Carlos I - and it also shows up that the judges of the Supreme Court and the National Audience act politically with their decisions and that if a just ruling is required, you have to go into exile and cross the Pyrenees.
It is a curious twist of fate and a reflection of the difference in criteria between Spanish and European justice that the Ghent Court of Appeal's rejection of the extradition order - allowing the rapper to travel in all EU countries except Spain, where he would be arrested - has been announced on the same days that we have learned that Juan Carlos I is preparing to return to Spain via Sanxenxo, in Galicia, at the end of this week, after fleeing to the United Arab Emirates on August 3rd, 2020. He will only stay for a few days, but it is clear that for quite some time the entire state apparatus has been working on the return of the king emeritus following the shelving of the judicial investigations for corruption that had been opened in Spain. Thus, the prosecutor's office had to do some intricate needlework, concluding that the alleged tax offences were no longer punishable because they were from before 2011 and thus the former monarch was able to elude prosecution for thirteen offences.
Juan Carlos I returns and Valtònyc is unable to. The former has been shown to have committed crimes, another thing is the statute of limitations. And Valtònyc will be able to travel all round Europe, but not set foot in Spain. A brand of justice "Made in Supreme Court" which explains perfectly how the Mallorcan rapper exclaimed after learning of the court decision that the great fear of an exile is that you will be forgotten and this hasn't happened, and that he wanted to start living his life. In addition to remembering the rapper Pablo Hasél, who is serving a sentence at the Ponent penitentiary centre for a fairly similar case.
Valtònyc's victory is enormously important, in the first place for him personally, but also in reinforcing the idea that exile is always able to achieve in European courts what it is denied in Spanish ones. We are about a month away from the moment when the European Court of Justice (ECJ) will rule on the preliminary questions raised by judge Pablo Llarena on the extradition of Catalan president Puigdemont. That ECJ decision will be the start of the resolution of all the work done by the lawyers of the president in exile and other members of the 2017 Catalan government residing in Belgium in denouncing the lack of neutrality of the Spanish judiciary. What the ECJ and the European General Court end up deciding will be final in terms of the ability of Carles Puigdemont to travel around Europe without any impediment. As well, the decision could open the door to a hypothetical return to Catalonia.