The Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe strongly criticises Spain and Turkey in its latest report:
«As regards Spain, the committee underlined its full respect for the Constitutional order of Spain. It recognised that the “mere expression of pro-independence views is not a ground for criminal prosecution”, but recalled that several senior Catalan politicians were prosecuted and eventually sentenced to long prison terms for sedition and other crimes, “inter alia for statements made in the exercise of their political mandates”, in support of the unconstitutional referendum on the independence of Catalonia in October 2017.
The committee called on the Spanish authorities to reform the criminal provisions on rebellion and sedition in such a way that they “cannot be interpreted so as to undo the decriminalisation of the organisation of an illegal referendum” in 2005 or lead to “disproportionate sanctions for non-violent transgressions”, to “consider pardoning or otherwise release” from prison the Catalan politicians convicted for their role in the organisation of the unconstitutional referendum and the related peaceful mass demonstrations, to “consider dropping extradition proceedings against Catalan politicians living abroad who are wanted on the same grounds” and to “drop the remaining prosecutions also of the lower-ranking officials involved in the 2017 unconstitutional referendum”.
The authorities should also refrain from requiring the detained Catalan politicians to disown “their deeply held political opinions” in exchange for a more favourable prison regime or a chance of pardon; they may however be “required to undertake to pursue their political objectives without recourse to illegal means”. The Committee underlined its respect for the independence of the Spanish tribunals to solve pending appeals, respecting as well the right to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in due course.
The adopted draft resolution is scheduled to be debated by the Parliamentary Assembly during its next plenary part-Session (21-24 June 2021).» (Font).
In the main, the Spanish central government led by Pedro Sánchez also remains irreconcilably hardline and shows no willingness to negotiate or dialogue. It still does not want to recognise the Catalan people's human right to self-determination, which is part of the Spanish legal system and mandatory law for Spain. It seems that the new Catalan president Pere Aragonès, elected on 21 May 2021, the first Catalan president of the Esquerra Republicana party in eighty years and 132nd president of the Generalitat de Catalunya, is currently more interested in a pardon for the political prisoners than in a vigorous continuation of the independence process, which suits the Spanish central government, even though he repeatedly emphasises in his speeches that he stands for the state independence of the Catalan nation in the form of a republic. His predecessor, Lluís Companys i Jover, was executed in October 1940 by the Spanish fascists to whom he had been handed over by Germany, which supported and tolerated Spain's oppression of the Catalan people not only during Nazism, but also after 1945 until today.