The Spanish government is to spend 545,000 euros (£490,000; $640,000) defending judge Pablo Llarena in Belgium. The Spanish justice ministry has hired Belgian firm Liedekerke Wolters Waelbroeck Kirkpatrick (LWWK) to represent the Spanish state and the Supreme Court judge in the civil lawsuit brought in Belgium by Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and ministers in exile with him.
The law firm, based in Brussels, will now be in contact with the Spanish state's legal service to direct its strategy. The Spanish legal service cannot appear itself in an ordinary court in a foreign country. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for 4th September, in which the parties will make their initial statements and the judge has to decide whether or not to accept to consider the lawsuit. Llarena is not required to attend in person, he can be represented by LWWK lawyers. The justice ministry says the contract is already signed.
Last week, on the other hand, the ministry was drawing a distinction between defending "the sovereignty of Spanish jurisdiction" and Llarena's "private acts". This drew a wave of criticism from PP and Cs as well as prosecutor and judge associations.
In the end, the Spanish government has taken on the costs of representing the judge and brought to an end the controversy over whether it should defend the judge or not. The justice minister, Dolores Delgado, denied this Monday that there has been a change of criteria, saying that they'd studied all scenarios and explained the whole procedure "with transparency". She then promised to defend the judge "to the last consequences".
The lawsuit against Llarena is based, to a large extent, on statements he made at a conference in Oviedo, claiming he didn't respect the right to presumption of innocence and violated their honour.
According to the justice ministry, the firm's objective will be to defend the "legal sovereignty and immunity" of Spain's courts in Belgium. This defence, they say, also includes that of the Supreme Court judge.