"There is something very rotten in the Spanish judicial system." This is what Anglo-Spanish writer and journalist John Carlin told the programme El Suplement on public station Catalunya Ràdio this Saturday. "This is the great problem," he said.
"What I have learned that I didn't know before is that the heart of darkness in Spain is in the judiciary, specifically the Supreme Court," he said. And he explained that "there is a sector that seems not to have passed through Spain's democratic transition." These people, said the former El País columnist, had somehow got stuck in the past.
Carlin asserted forcefully that the jailed pro-independence leaders are indeed political prisoners and described the situation they are going through as an "absolute aberration". "And nor would I like to exclude Sandro Rosell from this list either - in jail since May 2017 -" he said, referring to the former Barcelona football club president who is in preventive prison awaiting trial on money-laundering charges.
The writer also said that it seems "deplorable" that the most "progressive sectors in Spain" don't get out on the streets to protest about these issues.
According to Carlin, many of the complex political situations currently to be found in the most developed parts of the world, such as Brexit, the Catalonia crisis, or the conflictive politics of the United States, happen because "the priority of too many people is not to look for solutions, but to be right and based on that, to punish people."