Catalan pro-independence MEPs Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín have sent a letter to the secretary general of the European Commission, Ilze Juhansone, to denounce that there are four Spanish officials working in the institutions of the European Union who are promoting a letter against Spain's planned amnesty law, through which they seek to pressure justice commissioner Didier Reynders and values and transparency commissioner Vera Jourovà to act against this proposed legislation. Puigdemont and Comín's letter is also addressed to the EU's director general of agriculture and the director of the European Executive Agency for Investigation, since some of the officials who signed the letter against the amnesty are part of these bodies.
In the text, Puigdemont and Comín state that the signatories of this letter against the amnesty "use all the concepts and wording typical of Spain's opposition parties, including the extreme right party Vox". The two exiled Catalan politicians also state some of the promoters of the letter against the proposed amnesty law are "linked to the Spanish ultranationalist party Ciudadanos". Puigdemont and Comín indicate that although the promoters "acknowledge that the letter they send 'is exceptional within the framework of the development' of their functions as EU officials, the letter has a very high political component". In this regard, they maintain that these EU civil servants "have not honoured their positions" and, for this reason, they believe that "the Commission should treat the letter against the amnesty they sent as a circumvention of the Regulations for Officials and Other Servants of the EU and act accordingly". Specifically, they refer to a possible breach of paragraph 1 of article 11 of the regulations, which stipulates that officials "shall carry out the duties assigned to them objectively, impartially and in keeping with their duty of loyalty to the Union".
Reclamen la intervenció de la Comissió Europea davant de la carta enviada per funcionaris espanyols a la UE que incompleix, com a mínim, l’article 11 del codi de conducta dels funcionaris de la Unió Europea. pic.twitter.com/kvdHJv4NSN
— Junts i Lliures per Europa (@JuntsEU) November 16, 2023
Violent demonstrations in Madrid and Barcelona
The letter by Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín adds that the signatories of the text against the amnesty addressed to Reynders and Jourovà "mention the statement of the General Council of the Judiciary" - which the MEPs have also denounced - and that they use "the same arguments as the Spanish conservative spectrum, which has recently been organizing violent demonstrations in Madrid and Barcelona demanding, among other things, the assassination of political opponents and the total suppression of Catalonia's autonomy".