The High Court of Catalonia (TSJC) has sentenced the Catalan foreign minister, Mertixell Serret, to a year of disqualification from public office in any administration and ordered her to pay a fine of 12,000 euros after finding her guilty of a crime of disobedience of the Spanish Constitutional Court for her promotion of the Catalan independence referendum of 1st October 2017, the court reported this Wednesday. It is the same punishment that the public prosecutors asked the court to award to the ERC politician. Serret received support from party colleagues when the sentence was made public.
In the trial, Serret answered only one question from her lawyer and stated that she had backed a political action, whereas what had happened was that the independence movement had been criminalized, and that she supported a resolution outside the courts. Serret was in exile until she returned in March 2021, and was elected as a Catalan MP until 2022, and then assumed the foreign action portfolio when Junts left the Catalan government.
Acknowledged authorship
In the judgment, the court - made up of judges Fernando Lacaba, Francisco Segura and Marta Pesqueira - states that Meritxell Serret received no less than five requests from the Constitutional Court between 2016 and 2017 to not promote the parliamentary agreements, which had been suspended by the court, and "she neglected this [duty] as a member of the government of Catalonia". At that time, Serret was agriculture minister under the government of president Carles Puigdemont.
The court concluded that Serret was the author of an offence of serious disobedience and that she had "recognized it" in the trial. It added that her defence lawyer Iñigo Iruín "was clear when he admitted that he could not deny the accusations made against her, nor could he cover them up, but rather, he simply asserted that the refusal to comply with the repeated requirements of the Constitutional Court was not constitutive of the crime of disobedience.
"There is no right to decide"
Finally, the court also refused to apply any mitigating circumstances or exemption with regard to the punishment because it maintained that the error of prohibition cannot be applied to it, since "the illegality of the conduct of unilaterally holding a referendum on self-determination of an autonomous community, with a binding character, without the Spanish state's approval was general knowledge", and that "the invocation of property conflicts" is also not excusable, "even more so when the supposed 'right to decide' does not exist in our system as the Supreme Court previously explained, when giving its verdict on the condemnation of the Catalan separatists in 2019.
She'll remain in office
The TSJC's verdict is still subject to appeal and Mertixell Serret's defence could present a cassation appeal to the Supreme Court. The Pere Aragonès government has already stated that minister Serret will remain in office and that an appeal against the sentence will be presented. In the case of Serret, the Central Electoral Commission (JEC) cannot make her resign - as it did in the case of president Quim Torra - since she is not a deputy; she abandoned her seat a few months ago. And the cases of so-called "subsequent ineligibility" (article 6.2 LOREG), applied to Torra and the CUP's Pau Juvillà, were only related to their seats as deputies. Torra, however, had to leave the presidency because a president must be a deputy, an extreme punishment in the opinion of a part of the Constitutional Court.