No change. Spanish Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena is maintaining the charges against Catalan president-in-exile Carles Puigdemont as he configured them in January under Spain's Penal Code reform - that is, he seeks to bring Puigdemont to trial for alleged crimes of aggravated misuse of funds (penalized with a maximum of 8 years in prison) as well as disobedience, for his role in the organization of the Catalan independence process of 2017, and the same charges area also applied to two of the exiled Catalan ministers, Toni Comín and Lluís Puig, according to a resolution published this Tuesday by the Supreme Court. In the document, the judge rejects the demand of the public prosecutors and Spanish state solicitors to also prosecute Puigdemont under the new crime of aggravated public disorder, as a substitute for the crime of sedition which has been struck out. Llarena affirms that the law itself prohibits the application of a new crime to the pro-independence leaders in exile. Nevertheless, the application of the aggravated variant of misuse of funds to the spending on the Catalan referendum is at odds with the intention of ERC when it promoted the law change in alliance with the Spanish government last year, believing the higher-sentence variant could not be applied to the pro-independence leaders because they made no pecuniary gain from their actions.
In the resolution, the judge maintains the arrest warrant in the Spanish state for Puigdemont, Comín and Puig. In addition, the judge also declares that the former Catalan minister and current MEP, Clara Ponsatí, and the general secretary of the ERC party, Marta Rovira, will also be arrested, "only for the purpose of taking a statement for the crime of disobedience", that is to say, that he will not decree their preventive detention, an approach which was also taken with exiled CUP parliamentarian Anna Gabriel when she appeared before the Supreme Court, since the crime for which they are being prosecuted does not involve prison sentences, but rather, a ban from holding public office.
He discards immunity as MEPs
Judge Llarena also dismisses the arguments made by the defence team of Puigdemont and Comín, exercised by the lawyers Gonzalo Boye and Isabel Elbal, who maintain that the first resolution in which their Spanish domestic arrest warrants were dictated "was contrary to their immunity as parliamentarians", an issue which is pending resolution in the European General Court (ECG), in addition to the recent judgment of the Court of Justice (ECJ), which validates that non-compliance with a European arrest warrant by the country in which a wanted person resides may be justified if the person is part of an objectively identifiable group whose rights to a fair trial are less likely to be respected. Regarding the issue of new European Arrest Warrants, the judge admits that he has to wait for the decisions of the European courts.
Llarena maintains that "the EU treaty, with regard to the operation of immunity in Spanish territory, attributes to [the appellants] the privileges recognized to the members of the national parliament". He adds that the appellants were prosecuted on March 21st, 2018, and since they obtained immunity on June 13th, 2019 as MEPs, there is no need to request a waiver of parliamentary immunity for the measures that he has adopted. However, the judge adds that "in the hypothesis that in the future the defendants were materially deprived of liberty in Spain, if it were considered justified and effective to maintain their imprisonment beyond the time necessary to receive their statement, the authorization to attend the different parliamentary meetings would not be excluded, as ECJ jurisprudence states, as long as their immunity was not suspended". Thus, judge Llarena assures that in the hypothetical situation of Puigdemont being held under arrest in Spanish territory at some point in the future, Spanish justice would not exclude the possibility of granting him leave to attend the European Parliament. It is a prerogative that the Supreme Court itself refused to grant to the leader of ERC, Oriol Junqueras, in 2019, and which the Spanish court did not rectify despite the judgment of the ECJ in december of that year asserting that Junqueras was a member of the European Parliament.