The constitutional law professor who defined the crime of rebellion in Spain's 1995 Criminal Code, former Spanish deputy Diego López Garrido, has said this Saturday morning that he cannot understand how the Spanish public prosecutor has attributed this offence to those accused in the Catalan independence referendum case. "According to the criminal code, no rebellion took place."
In an interview with the Catalunya Radio programme El Suplement, López Garrido said that the interpretation that is being made of the crime of rebellion is "incomprehensible". "I don't understand how the events that took place can be interpreted as insurrectionary violence", he added.
The 1995 Criminal Code defines rebellion as a "public and violent uprising" used to achieve one of several ends, including "to declare the independence of a part of Spanish territory". "In what happened in Catalonia, there's an element missing, the violent action," said Lopez Garrido. "Furthermore, it is not just talking about isolated violence, but insurrectional violence, that has the capacity to call into question the territorial integrity of the state."
López Garrido explained that when he proposed the inclusion of this crime in the Criminal Code he conceived it to respond to an "armed military uprising" with "significant physical violence" that would require the declaration of a state of siege, or the taking of emergency powers.
"In the Criminal Code, the violence is not a hypothesis. The violence has to be a verified fact. Therefore, it is a juridically incorrect interpretation", he affirmed. However, the Constitutional Law professor added that he had confidence in the Spanish judicial system, which he described as "a system of independent judges".