Former Minister of Culture and President of the Catalan Parliament Laura Borràs i Castanyer is one of the most prominent Catalan politicians who is being persecuted by the Spanish judiciary and press through a lawfare campaign for her courageous advocacy of Catalan independence in the form of a republic. Her political proximity to Catalan president-in-exile Carles Puigdemont made her a target of the Spanish deep state. Two Catalan authors have researched and documented how she has been the target of this campaign, a summary of which is published below.

The Catalan people are the direct holders of the first human right of the great civil covenants of the United Nations, which is also a binding right in Spain. The right to self-determination allows the Catalan nation to secede from the Spanish state and establish its own state, the Catalan Republic. What Spain does in this respect may delay the process of Catalonia's independence from Spain, but it will not prevent it.

Prof. Dr. Axel Schönberger

David Ros i Serra / Isidre Llucià i Sabarich:

The case of President Laura Borràs is a case of judicial warfare (lawfare)

The two authors of this article have spent more than forty years in the service of the local administration, in which we have both worked as municipal secretary and comptroller, a fact that has allowed us to know the applicable legislation on town planning, finance, personnel contracting, works and services... and which allows us to give our opinion with full knowledge of the facts.

For more than two years we have seen how the President of the Parliament, Laura Borràs, was persecuted in an unfounded way for an administrative action that had been done in accordance with the law when she was president of the Institution of Catalan Letters, despite the fact that the facts that were happening affirmed exactly the opposite.

We have been hurt by the participation in this lynching of different adversaries, both here and there, and by the confluence of the complicity of power, the media, judicial operators and, above all, of a deep state that aims to protect the raison d'état.

Two years ago, we tried to write an article clarifying the absurdities we saw both in the accusation of the President of the Parliament and in her dismissal by the Parliament's Bureau. We had seen, because we investigated it, partial screenshots of the police reports that ended with a sentence such as «from which no criminal matter can be deduced», but in reality we did not have these reports despite having read these fragments. Nor did we have the expert report made by the defence of the accused in the trial, nor did we know the reports of the Guardia Civil, nor the challenge that would be made later in another trial to the Parliamentary bureau of the person who was the rapporteur of the sentence that condemned Laura Borràs.

Precisely, the same sentence, including the dissenting vote of a judge, and the knowledge of some of the documents that we have just cited have now allowed us to make a technical-legal and analytical report, based on the Law on public sector contracts of the sentence that condemns the president of the Parliament of Catalonia.

Although the two authors have our own personal opinions, we have made an effort to ensure that they did not influence the report and that it responded to a technical-legal approach.

In the report we explain different aspects that we summarise below:

— The Laura Borràs case is a case of judicial war. This term is used in different ways with similar meanings: war against the enemy using judicial tools, use and abuse of the law, judicial war, judicial persecution ...

— Laura Borràs authorised expenditure in the form of a minor contract, in the manner provided for in the Public Sector Contracts Law in force at the time, which indicated that the processing of the file only required the approval of the expenditure and the incorporation of the corresponding invoice.

— The award of the contract to the supplier did not involve any administrative irregularity and was therefore not a criminal offence. Minor contracts could, at that time, be awarded directly to any businessman with the capacity to act and who had the necessary professional authorisation to provide the service.

— The different contracts had no functional unity, according to the expert report citing the Guardia Civil's report, and therefore, it was not possible to split anything up. So much so, as the same sentence indicates, that she was not tried for this possible crime, despite the fact that this was repeated by both the public prosecutor and the different media at all times.

— The magistrate of the court points out in her dissenting opinion that neither can she be considered to have induced a crime of false documentation, given that the budgets that the ILC requested from the suppliers were not necessary for anything, given that the act of awarding the contract had already been carried out beforehand.

— If there is no irregularity in the awarding, if there has been no fractioning, if there has been no personal gain, as the sentence clearly states, there has been no corruption either. And this is what the judgement itself says:

«As evidence of this, it is made clear to us, already in the process, that the initial enquiries aimed at investigating the possible commission of a crime of embezzlement of public funds, ended up falling apart, and no charges were even brought for this type of offence, nor for any other from which it could be deduced that any profit or economic benefit was obtained by any of the persons related to these events. This means that there is no record of any economic damage to the ILC arising from these events.»

— In the report we also give our opinion on why we believe it was not a fair trial.

As Damià Del Clot says in his book Lawfare: L'estratègia de la repressió contra l'independentisme català («Lawfare: The strategy of repression against Catalan independence»):

«Francoism already used the law and the courts of exception to annihilate political dissidence ... Today lawfare is a strategy that requires the complicity of the government, the media, judicial operators and, above all, a deep state that aims to protect the reason of state. And this is only possible by making use of the criminal and procedural law of the enemy.»

All these complicities have concurred in the Laura Borràs case. 

The synthetic summary that we have just made has the defects of the synthesis, which does not explain everything, so we recommend that anyone who still has doubts and wants to know more should read the following technical-legal report.

https://masponsianglasell.cat/2023/12/27/el-cas-de-la-presidenta-laura-borras-es-un-cas-de-lawfare/

Published with the permission of the digital magazine Unilateral - El Digital de la República Catalana.