A new development in the disobedience case against the members of Catalan Parliament's Bureau, following an initiative from the defence team of the former deputy speaker, Josep Costa. Costa's lawyer had requested the recusal of judge Carlos Ramos, and the High Court of Catalonia (TSJC) has ended up accepting this, excluding the judge from the trial against Costa himself, former speaker of the house Roger Torrent, and ex-Bureau members Eusebi Campdepadrós and Adriana Delgado. At the beginning of July, Costa was already successful in calling for another recusal, that of the president of the TSJC, Jesús Maria Barrientos, on the ground of a lack of impartiality. After that success, he decided to present a new recusal with the same argument against Carlos Ramos, which has ended up being backed by the judges, and this is turn now raises the possibility of a new claim against the investigator of the recusal appeal, Maria Eugènia Alegret. The four Catalan pro-independence politicians facing trial are accused of disobedience of the Constitutional Court's instructions when they decided to allow parliament to discuss and vote on two motions in 2019: one pro-Catalan independence, and one censuring the Spanish monarch.
Costa has already celebrated this decision by the TSJC with a tweet, in which he wrote: "The TSJ has just announced that it has also accepted my recusal claim against judge Carlos Ramos, who was appointed at the proposal of the PSC. Step by step, we continue dismantling the farce of a pre-orchestrated trial to continue silencing the voice of the Catalans represented in Parliament. We continue!"
Trial delayed
Initially, this trial had been scheduled to begin on July 12th, but with the decision that Barrientos was not eligible to take part, the TSJC announced that it would be suspended in order to assemble a new court, according to the rules of distribution and substitution in force. An additional factor is that the civil and criminal chamber of the TSJC has very few judges and, as in the case of this trial, it is frequent that the numbers of judges required to hear a case can only be reached by bringing in reinforcements from other sections of the court.
In the case of Carlos Ramos, the public prosecutors along with the private prosecution brought by Vox took a position against Costa. In the first case, they reproached him that "once again he attributes an alleged and unrealistic lack of impartiality" to the judge. "The present recusal lacks foundation and its fraudulent nature is patent, given that the defendant's intention - the obstructionist attitude throughout the processing of the main case is notorious - is none other than to try postpone the holding of the oral trial against himself and try to remove - through successive recusal incidents - any new judge that is appointed to be part of the court that must try him", they assured. Vox also asserted that there had been an "indiscriminate use of the mechanism of recusal".