The Spanish prime minister has put on the table, coinciding with the negotiation of the annual government budget, the possible modification of the Penal Code to reduce the punishments prescribed for the crime of sedition and adapt them, he says, to the average level among European countries. This would mean, according to Pedro Sánchez, reducing the current penalty of between 10 and 15 years' jail to a range that he has not specified, but which could well be around 5 years. Everything suggests, or at least that's what we're being led to believe, that the Spanish government isn't bluffing and would be willing to go ahead with this before the municipal elections. And the Spanish PM has even indicated publicly that he will go ahead with his initiative if he has support guaranteed from the deputies of the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), because he does not want the project to be rejected by Congress.
As is always the case, behind any flashy headline there is always some fine print which is almost always the most significant part. In the case of the crime of sedition there are two things that are fundamental: in addition to the reduction of penalties, would the definition of the crime specify that the use of violence would be required for the offence to apply, something that other country's laws set out, but not Spain's? Isn't this a way of definitively renouncing the claim for an amnesty which was the point of union between the three pro-independence political forces and the sovereignist civil society groups? Because the truth is that, as was seen in the past, when the European Arrest Warrants were activated from Spanish justice to arrest president Carles Puigdemont in 2018 and bring him back to Spain, after he had been imprisoned in Neumünster prison, the territorial court of Schleswig-Holstein was only willing to hand him over to be tried for misuse of public funds.
It is very important to remember this because, located beyond the maximum sentences set for the offence, is the central core of the debate: what is meant by sedition? Do we want to move towards a convergence with Europe in which there are countries that have not defined anything called sedition, or do we want to continue to go our own way with just a coating of varnish to put a shine on it? Because if there is no agreement on this, debating the number of years in the sentence is a meaningless gesture. From the beginning of the debate, which had already been raised before the granting of pardons to the political prisoners (June 2021), and became deadlocked because Pedro Sánchez opted for those pardons that he did not have to bring to parliament, the Spanish government has been elusive. It knows that the right is waiting for it at the corner and will make comprehensive use of the amendment of the sedition law as an electoral weapon. It has already been seen with the negotiation for the renewal of the General Council for the Judiciary that seemed to be all set, which the People's Party has now paralyzed until Sánchez takes a step back.
The Catalan pro-independence parties occupy positions ranging from ERC's caution over the reform of the law, to the outright opposition of Junts and the CUP, which only accept the repeal of the crime. Among the many ways to gesture something more than just a message of caution over Sánchez's initiative is this tweet by Joseba Azkarraga, justice minister in the Basque Country for almost eight years and with a very long political career. Says Azkarraga: "The debate cannot be about whether or not the definition of sedition should reduce its jail terms to half. The debate must be about whether or not placing ballot boxes can be considered a crime. And that was, and always will be, an exercise in democracy". There are not many ways to say it more clearly, more simply and more understandable: accepting the Spanish mental framework that 1st October was a crime is a red line that the independence movement should not cross. Above all, because, in the future, who knows, it might allow a conviction backed by a new Penal Code that they would have been approved with their votes.
We need guarantees that do not exist, that Pedro Sánchez does not want to give, and although it is good to think about the past, we also need to think about the future. Among other things, because our experience very frequently gives us the impression that Spanish justice first establishes the years of the sentence and then completes it by defining the crimes that were committed. And if it has to be 12 years in prison, they will say 12 years in prison whether the Penal Code is amended or not, and convictions for some other crime will end up becoming more common. And the important thing is not to lose sight of what German justice did in 2018: neither rebellion, nor sedition. If anything, misuse of public funds. Nothing more. This is the way and anything else is a shortcut to an unknown path.