The decision by an appeals section of the Catalan High Court (TSJC) to declare extinguished the criminal responsibility of the former Catalan interior minister Miquel Buch and the Mossos d'Esquadra police officer Lluís Escolà, whom Buch hired as an adviser, in application of the amnesty law approved by Congress a couple of weeks ago, marks the definitive start of the application of a disputed law whose destruction has been widely plotted. Buch was sentenced to four and a half years in prison by the Barcelona Audience after it concluded that Escolà was, in practice, hired to act as a bodyguard for the Catalan president in exile, Carles Puigdemont, and not as an advisor, a version that the former minister always denied and documented extensively. The TSJC also issued three other resolutions in which it also applies the amnesty to the first sixteen pro-independence activists and demonstrators sentenced to prison terms.
While we await what judge Pablo Llarena ends up dictating on whether or not to suspend the arrest warrants for Carles Puigdemont, Toni Comín and Lluís Puig - it is speculated that the decision could be this very Friday - and also the judge Manuel Marchena, on the members of the Catalan government of 2017 convicted for misuse of funds and thus banned from holding public office - Oriol Junqueras, Jordi Turull, Quim Forn, Raül Romeva, Dolors Bassa - in the trial of the Catalan independence process leaders, the fact that the judicial clock on the amnesty has started ticking is good news. And the fact that a particularly scandalous case has been chosen, because of the persecution of a Junts politician as significant as Miquel Buch for his time in the interior ministry and of a past security escort for the president in exile, allows us to visualize that the amnesty will have among its beneficiaries, as well as many unknown faces who suffered unjust judicial repression, others much more recognizable who also suffered retaliation.
Among the beneficiaries of the amnesty, as well as many unknown faces who suffered unjust judicial repression, will be others much more recognizable
The case of Buch is particularly paradigmatic, since in addition to the repression and brutality of the state was his unjust removal from a cabinet post by president Quim Torra who made him responsible for the Catalan police action after the street violence following the Supreme Court's sentencing of the pro-independence leaders' trial. Buch assumed his severance in 2020, which a very significant part of Together for Catalonia (Junts) did not want, but he did not confront Torra. Nevertheless, as often happens, politics has its twists and turns and ends up leading to situations that earlier were unthinkable. His replacement in the position, in September 2020, was the lawyer Miquel Sàmper, who was presented as a markedly pro-independence leader, much more radical and who had appeared on the local lists of Junts in the city of Terrassa. Well, in the last Catalan elections this May, Sàmper, currently a radio talkshow regular on El món a RAC1, lent his name to the platform supporting a Catalan presidency led by the Socialist Salvador Illa. Little more than three years had passed between the first move and the second.
PS: Due to the importance of implementing the amnesty law in Catalonia, I have left for another day the agreement between the main Spanish parties, the PSOE and the PP, on the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ). If the maximum victory that the Socialists can achieve is the agreements that they have presented to us, the PP can breathe easy, since in the judicial world - and the CGPJ is not exactly that, but it is key and definitive - its strength will not be diminished. Having made this assessment, it is still surprising that the 26 congressional deputies of ERC, Junts, Bildu and the PNV are not able to influence anything and have limited themselves to being mere spectators to the agreement between Socialists and conservatives. Certainly, they are not arithmetically necessary, but they should be in their condition as political parties that are essential in order for Pedro Sánchez to govern. If the agreement between the PP and PSOE is ten CGPJ members each, they should have demanded two members for themselves who could only come from those chosen by the Socialists. Facilitating governance in Spain should not be restricted to just entering into autonomous community issues, but also being able to sit where the power of the state sits, be it on the CGPJ, the board of the Bank of Spain, the National Commission for the Securities Market and the National Commission on Markets and Competition. A pity.