Gonzalo Boye, lawyer for Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín, is certain: his strategy will pay off. "We're in the phase where they're laughing at us and in the end things turn out as we say", he told Catalan public broadcaster TV3 in an interview today, the day after trying to get his clients accredited as MEPs.
Boye went to the Congress in Madrid yesterday, to the room where Spain's new MEPs were "swearing or promising" to obey the Constitution. He presented a letter signed by a Belgian notary confirming that Puigdemont and Comín had given the oath. According to Boye, he did so having received "special powers" from his two clients. A Congress lawyer, however, told him he couldn't submit the document so he left.
Instead, he decided to register it with the Central Electoral Commission. He believes this to be a valid option because, he says, members of Spain's Congress and Senate have done the same in the past. "People think we're improvising and that's not the case," he said.
According to the lawyer, they have anticipated all the obstacles: "Everything that's happening, we've anticipated it. It seems that these people have an enormous capacity for making mistakes," he joked. He believes the Commission will "again refuse to budge", despite four senators having done the same thing this legislature.
Court of Justice of the European Union.
The Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg is Boye's new target: "Arriving at this court is the legal strategy we've been preparing since December". "We're not improvising anything - we've got it all studied. They're doing what we wanted. It was already planned to go to Luxembourg," he said.
Also today, in Brussels, former president Puigdemont said he would be appealing to the court to be able to take his seat as an MEP in a press conference during which he also announced he will be attending the opening of Parliament next month regardless.