Gonzalo Boye, lawyer to Carles Puigdemont, has asserted in an interview with Catalonia's TV3 that the Spanish Supreme Court "may take its time" with the processing of the pardons for those convicted in the 2019 pro-independence leaders trial, even after the Sánchez government has published them in the official gazette.
Slow processing
Boye explains that if the pardons were total, and not partial as is expected, "no calculation would need to be made" and the process would be much more agile. The lawyer to the exiled Catalan politicians says that, in the absence of any law that defines the maximum period that the Supreme Court could use for the procedure, the court "could delay the granting of pardons."
In a recent article in ElNacional.cat, Boye explained that there is a long and politicized route which the pardons have to traverse before they become effective. "When the pardons are granted, they have to be communicated to the sentencing court (the criminal chamber of the Supreme Court), which will work with the prisons to process the new calculations of the sentences, and these will then have to be re-approved," he explained.
The Supreme Court chamber will be in charge of deciding the penalties that remain for the prisoners to serve, without having any legal time limit on making its decision. And this will be in addition "to the legitimization that the Popular Party and Vox may have to file appeals against the procedures".
According to Boye, the pardons themselves "will end up becoming judicialized just as the whole conflict between the Spanish state and the Catalan independence movement has been. Thus, whatever the outcome of this chapter is, it is far from an event that will occur quickly, because, as you can see, we are facing a complex matter, with multiple aspects and not all of them - probably just a small part - controllable from politics".
Screenshot of Boye's interview on Catalan public television
"European law is not being respected"
During the interview on TV3, the lawyer argued that "the pardons will not affect the exiles", but that he will also have to wait for the interpretation which the Supreme Court makes. Boye predicts there will be partial pardons given that only affect the offence of sedition, a crime that he calls "medieval and unconstitutional."
In reference to the exiled Catalan politicians, he also pointed out that the independence leaders are now free to move throughout Europe, including Spain, but that "it seems that European law is not being respected from the Pyrenees down."
"It only leads to discredit "
Boye summed up by saying that the Spanish state "has made a mistake, it has gone down a road that leads nowhere, only to its discredit." "This game has already been won and now it is only a question of knowing how many more moves are required to bring it to an end," he explained in reference to the European Arrest Warrants issued for the pro-independence leaders.
Main image: Gonzalo Boye on TV3.