Together with the entire democratically elected and democratically legitimised Catalan government, Lluís Puig had been deposed by the Spanish government in October 2017 in breach of organic law of the Spanish state. Together with the Catalan president and other ministers, he went into exile. The members of the government who remained in Spain were sentenced in the first and only (!) instance by a court without legal jurisdiction, the Supreme Court in Madrid, to years of imprisonment for holding a referendum that was not punishable under Spanish law. This judgement wrote European history of injustice and represents a serious violation of human rights comparable to injustice judgements of National Socialist and Francoist courts. The judges and prosecutors involved in these proceedings should themselves be brought before an international Spain tribunal of the United Nations, which has yet to be set up!
The same Spanish Supreme Court — which simply has no jurisdiction in this case under Spanish law — demanded that Belgium extradite the deposed Catalan Minister of Culture, Lluís Puig i Gordi, who has since become director of the Catalan government's ‘Programme for the Development of Cultural Projects in an International Context’. Contrary to what is claimed by a not only Spanish ‘lying press’ — unfortunately, one cannot call it anything else with the best will in the world —, the Catalan ministers and their president, who were politically persecuted by Spain, never ‘fled’ from justice, but were always available to it without any ifs and buts. It is their right as citizens of the European Union to be in any place in the Union and to be available to the courts there, as they are supposed to be, when called upon to do so, which they have always done without any restriction. Anyone who claims that they have fled from justice is telling the untruth or is lying, provided they know the facts, which one may well assume in the case of journalists.
When the Spanish Supreme Court — which, let it be repeated, has no jurisdiction in this case under Spanish law — demanded the extradition of Lluís Puig i Gordi by means of a European arrest warrant, Belgian courts ruled in the first instance and now (on 7 January 2021) also in the second instance that Belgium could not comply with this request because the Supreme Court and its judge Pablo Llarena, who sought the extradition, were not and are not competent for this case under Spanish law. The Catalans politically persecuted by Spain and the Catalan political prisoners in Spain, whose illegal deprivation of liberty by the Spanish judiciary is a blatant injustice and has long been a disgrace for the entire European Union, have repeatedly argued this. They were right to do so, as two Belgian courts have now found — and in Belgium, in contrast to post-democratic Spain, there is a functioning judiciary and, above all, a functioning separation of powers.
The two Belgian court decisions make it clear to the whole of Europe: the legal persecution and sentencing of the political prisoners incarcerated in Spain was and is unlawful! It violates Spanish law. It violates the European Convention on Human Rights. It violates human rights and thus imperative higher-ranking law (ius cogens), which Spain has incorporated as such into its constitution.
The Belgian court of first instance expressly pointed out that the competent body of the United Nations, the Working Group against Arbitrary Detention, recognised by the European Court of Human Rights as a de facto higher instance, had officially stated that the Supreme Court, which sentenced the Catalan politicians to long prison terms, had no legal jurisdiction in this case and that it also lacked admissible charges. The UN Working Group against Arbitrary Detention has urged Spain to release the political prisoners, provide adequate compensation and initiate criminal investigations against the prosecutors, judges and other persons responsible for their arbitrary detention. The Belgian court took note of this in the first instance and acknowledged it accordingly.
In the second instance, the competent Belgian court also found — and this accusation weighs very heavily and exposes the Spanish judiciary in an unprecedented manner — that public statements by public prosecutors, judges and high-ranking politicians seriously violate the right of presumption of innocence in criminal proceedings and thus the «DIRECTIVE (EU) 2016/343 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 9 March 2016 on the strengthening of certain aspects of the presumption of innocence and of the right to be present at the trial in criminal proceedings».
This is a first class legal slap in the face for the Spanish judges, prosecutors and politicians who are illegally using Spanish criminal law to oppress the Catalan people and deny them the free exercise of the first human right of the United Nations Civil Covenants! If European leaders continue to look the other way and tolerate the injustice that Spain has inflicted and is inflicting on the Catalan people (and not only on them!), they will one day have to put up with being compared in the history books with those who looked the other way, remained silent and did nothing in the face of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. The European Union becomes untrustworthy when it denounces human rights violations in other states of the world, but tolerates and thus supports the massive and ongoing human rights violations that the Spanish state has committed and continues to commit against the Catalan people and their representatives. Every representative of the European Union, every politician of a European state should know that one day he or she will have to be judged morally on how he or she has behaved in the matter of human rights violations in the Catalonia conflict. So far, all European courts that have dealt with the cases of the Catalans legally persecuted by Spain, as well as the competent body of the United Nations, have exclusively found in favour of the Catalans. How blind, how naive or how brazen do one have to be to remain silent as a politician committed to human rights and thus support the Spanish state in its unlawful persecution actions, which may one day be described worldwide as ‘criminal’ and as ‘crimes against humanity’?
And still, shamefully: Europe remains silent and only watches! Poor Europe!