President Carles Puigdemont and the imprisoned JxCat deputies "accept" the Catalan Parliament Board's decision to strike down their delegated votes. They say so in a joint letter from Waterloo and Lledoners prison, in which they show themselves prepared to lose the pro-independence majority in the chamber. Despite the Board's request for them to change position, the four deputies affected express conviction that "the 61-seat majority will allow the current government to continue and to keep promoting the republican project".
In the letter, written before the Board's decision today, Carles Puigdemont, Jordi Sànchez, Jordi Turull and Josep Rull say that if the decision turned out to be to "prevent us from exercising our right", they would accept it and "our rights will stop being taken into account".
The deputies write that their delegated votes can only be struck down "based on reasoning subject to possible coercions from a body alien to the legislative power". They say that delegating their votes "perfectly in accordance with the law", because the Parliament rejected their suspension as deputies last week. "It was an act of democratic normality and sovereignty," they say..
In the letter, the JxCat deputies argue that their status as such has been "altered" by judge Pablo Llarena. They express conviction that they are still in prison because they haven't renounced their seats. They also attack Llarena's suggestion of substitute deputies, which "aimed, clumsily, to whitewash a manifestly unjust decision of unequivocal seriousness democratically-speaking".
Puigdemont and the prisoners call for respect for the decision by their ERC colleagues to accept substitutions, "in the same way that we ask for our decision to be respected too". They promise to keep fighting: "Once again we will go to Europe and the world to find the justice that the Spanish state denies us and denies itself".