The division is growing. Spain's full Constitutional Court today rejected, by six votes in favour to three against, the appeal filed by the former Catalan vice-president and ERC party leader, Oriol Junqueras, and former foreign minister in the same government, Raül Romeva, sentenced by the Supreme Court to 13 and 12 years in prison respectively, for sedition and misuse of public funds to promote the independence process in Catalonia. The judge Ramón Sáez Valcarcel, one of the recent new additions to the court (proposed by the Socialist party), gave a dissenting opinion, along with court vice president Juan Antonio Xiol and judge María Luisa Balaguer, both of whom have asserted in several cases considered over the last few months that Spanish sentences on the Catalan independence leaders cases were "disproportionate". The full ruling will not be made public until tomorrow - a practice that is too common. Moreover, Thursday will also see the announcement of the courts' response to the appeals filed by former Catalan government ministers Dolors Bassa and Joaquim Forn, the last two of the nine pro-independence leaders convicted for sedition whose constitutional appeals remain before the court.
The Constitutional Court reports that tomorrow it will also publish an "extensive and explanatory" report on the content of all the rulings resolving the appeals for constitutional protection filed by the Catalan political and social leaders, convicted by the Supreme Court on October 14th, 2019. With respect to the cases of Junqueras and Romeva, the court notes that judges Antonio Narváez and Cándido Conde-Pumpido recused themselves from the case, a recusal that had been demanded by the defence lawyers of the pro-independence leaders.
The nine Catalan political prisoners - who all served over three years in prison before being released under a partial pardon in June 2021 - have repeatedly complained about the absence of any response from the Constitutional Court on their appeals, which had the effect of preventing them from taking their cases to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Finally, the first appeal was resolved last April, when the majority of the court rejected that there was any breach of constitutional rights against former minister Jordi Turull. Judges Xiol and Balaguer, however, stated in a separate opinion, that Turull, sentenced to 12 years in prison for sedition, received a “disproportionate” sentence from the Spanish high court, giving arguments directly opposed to those of the rest of the court which dismissed Turull's appeal and upheld the Supreme Court's 2019 verdict. The same pattern was repeated with minister Josep Rull in May 2021; in June, with the then-president of Òmnium, Jordi Cuixart, and former ANC leader, Jordi Sànchez; and in November, with former speaker of the Catalan parliament, Carme Forcadell.
Specifically, in the case of Turull, the two judges considered that the Constitutional Court "should have ruled in favour of the appeal for constitutional protection for violation of the right to criminal legality, and in relation to the rights to personal liberty, ideological freedom and freedom of assembly." However, the majority court view rejected each and every one of Jordi Turull's complaints concerning the violation of his fundamental rights. The Constitutional Court said that there was "no pejorative treatment of the defences" in the trial as Turull's assertions in his appeal "lack relevance for the fixation of the facts." In the case of the Jordis, Cuixart and Sànchez, the two judges claimed in their dissenting opinion that a "severe" penal response had been given to their exercising of the fundamental right of assembly, something which has "an undesirable effect of discouragement" against the exercising of these rights by others.