Spain's Constitutional Court has upheld the suspensions of former Catalan vice-president Oriol Junqueras and other deputies facing charges for their roles in last year's independence referendum.
The court has unanimously decided in plenary session to refuse to suspend the Supreme Court's verdicts from 9th and 30th July this year which block Oriol Junqueras, Jordi Turull, Jordi Sànchez, Josep Rull and Raül Romeva from exercising their roles as deputies in the Parliament of Catalonia for as long as they remain in pretrial detention.
The verdict says that "agreeing to the suspension [of the verdict decreeing the deputies' suspensions] would be equivalent to anticipating their amparo [constitutional] appeal being eventually upheld and would mean temporarily not applying a norm of legal rank, article 384 b of the Law of Criminal Procedure, whose jurisdictional use enjoys presumption of legitimacy".
The resolution, drawing on constitutional doctrine, says that "in this procedural step, no analysis of the underlying question can be carried out, nor can the factual basis which sustain it be questioned, nor can that which has to be resolved in the opportune verdict be improperly anticipated". The Court has turned down the appeal presented by a group of private individuals, headed by writer Jaume Cabré Fabré, who argued that the Supreme Court's decision had violated their constitutional right to participate in public life through their freely elected representatives.