In an interview with the Catalan news portal VilaWeb on 13 March 2021, which has already attracted a lot of attention, one of the lawyers of the Catalan president-in-exile Carles Puigdemont, Gonzalo Boye, explains various legal facts which, taken together, make it seem likely that there will be no extradition of the MEPs Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín, who are being politically persecuted by Spain, from Belgium to Spain.
If the statements of the hitherto very successful lawyer are also correct this time, Pablo Llarena, judge at the Spanish Supreme Court, has made the mistake of requesting the waiver of the immunity of the three Catalan MEPs only for the purpose of further processing the European arrest warrant issued by Spain against the three Catalan MEPs. The waiver of their immunity had also been made only in accordance with this request and had thus been limited to this purpose only.
The same Spanish judge had informed the Belgian authorities on 10 January 2020 of the suspension of the European arrest warrant he had issued against Carles Puigdemont and Toní Comín, so that his request for the waiver of the immunity of the Catalan MEPs could first be decided by the European Parliament. As this decision has now been taken, the Spanish judge must now inform the competent Belgian authorities whether the execution of the European arrest warrant is now to be carried out, whether the matter has been settled in the meantime or whether the arrest warrant should remain suspended until the ECJ has answered various questions to the Spanish judge on this matter. These questions are aimed at obtaining an opinion from the ECJ on final court decisions already handed down in member states of the European Union, in particular on the proceedings of the Belgian judiciary concluded in the second instance, in which — among other things with reference to a final decision of the competent body of the United Nations — an extradition of the Catalan Minister in Exile Lluís Puig to Spain was prohibited, since, on the one hand, the Supreme Court was not competent to issue the European arrest warrant against him under Spanish law and, on the other hand, Lluís Puig could not expect a fair trial in Spain, insofar as Spain clearly violated 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». Pablo Llarena thus wants, among other things, the European Court of Justice to find that the first and second instance judgements of the Belgian judiciary are incompatible with European law. It is extremely unlikely that this will happen, as the Belgian judges ruled competently and in strict compliance with Belgian, European and mandatory international law, and the Belgian Public Prosecutor's Office did not raise any objections to the second-instance decision before the competent Court of Cassation.
Thus, lifting the suspension of the European arrest warrants against Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín in Belgium can only lead to the same chamber, which was also competent in the case of Lluís Puig, coming to the same result in the same proceedings under the same file reference and refusing to execute the European arrest warrants. As soon as these proceedings are concluded, however, the full immunity of the two Catalan MEPs will be revived, as the suspension of their immunity was only aimed at the conclusion of these proceedings. In the case of Prof. Dr. iur. Clara Ponsatí, the Scottish judiciary is also likely to decide in the same way as the Belgian judiciary.
In addition, the Belgian and Scottish judiciary will have to answer the question of whether the issuing of the European arrest warrants against the three Catalan MEPs, who were already elected at the time of the issuing of the arrest warrants and thus protected by their parliamentary immunity, was at all legal. The fact that the Spanish court which issued these European arrest warrants was not competent has already been established in the same proceedings.
As things stand at present, it seems that the legal assessment of the lawyer Boye is correct and that a renewed activation of the three European arrest warrants on the part of the Spanish judge Pablo Llarena will in any case lead to a reopening in Belgium (and in all probability also in Scotland) and then to the termination of the proceedings, whereby the immunity of the two Catalan MEPs would immediately be revived in full. Even in the unlikely event that the Belgian judiciary decided to execute the European arrest warrants, the two MEPs could not be convicted in Spain because of their still existing immunity, since the Spanish request to the European Parliament was not for the waiver of immunity for the purpose of conviction for the alleged ‘crimes’ of which the three MEPs were accused by Spain, but only for the purpose of finalising the European arrest warrants. This procedure will now end with a clear decision to extradite or refuse to extradite the Catalan MEPs to Spain. With the end of these proceedings, however, they will again enjoy full parliamentary immunity as MEPs. It thus seems that the Spanish judge has made another serious mistake.
The European Parliament will then have to fulfil its obligation to grant protection to the three Catalan MEPs persecuted by Spain and to ensure that they are free from any legal persecution throughout the territory of the European Union, including in Spain and in particular in their constituencies in Catalonia. Spain will thus also have to withdraw its national arrest warrants against the three MEPs. Otherwise, a legal situation could arise that could lead to the nullification of the election of the next European Parliament and thus plunge the entire European Union into a deep crisis.
The way Spain's Catalan political prisoners are currently treated in the penal system violates elementary legal principles and is reminiscent of dictatorships. To revoke prison sentences that have already been relaxed because the prisoners have not changed their political opinion and continue to openly support the independence of the Catalan people, which is their fundamental and human right, also protected by the Spanish constitution, represents such a profound, almost barbaric breach of European legal norms and the European Convention on Human Rights that the European Union will have to react to it sooner or later if it does not want to completely lose its credibility and raison d'être. As far as I can see, among all European leaders, the Prime Minister of Flanders, Jan Jambon, was the first to speak out clearly and to react as one would expect from any decent politician who stands up for the fundamental values of the European Union and human rights and who has learned his lessons from German, Italian and Spanish history at the time of fascism:
https://twitter.com/SanderLoones/status/1370109998685163520?s=20
It can be assumed that all those MEPs who have learned their lessons from the European history of the years 1933-1945 will have voted unanimously against the lifting of the immunity of the three Catalan MEPs. After all, it is well known that the victory of the mass murderer Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent brutal, decades-long oppression of the Catalan people, which was aimed at their destruction as an independent people with its own language and culture and forced assimilation into the Spanish language and nation and thus constituted a crime against humanity, would not have been possible without Hitler's support. On the other hand voted for the lifting of the immunity of the three Catalan MEPs should know in which historical tradition and in which conflict with the fundamental values of the European Community they have placed themselves with their voting behaviour.