The Diplomat
The decision of the European Parliament to lift the immunity for Carles Puigdemont has opened a new chapter in the internal fractures of the coalition government and even threatens to shake the parliamentary foundations of Pedro Sánchez’s Executive.
The request presented in 2020 by the Supreme Court to lift the parliamentary immunity of the former president of the Generalitat of Catalonia and the former ministers Toni Comín and Clara Ponsatí went ahead this past Monday with 400 votes in favor (the bulk of the European Popular Party, the Socialists and the Liberals), 248 against (The Greens and the Left, in addition to the French far-right Marine Le Pen, among others) and 45 abstentions. Among the 59 Spanish MEPs, the request had the support of the PSOE (21), PP (13), Ciudadanos (seven) and Vox (four) and the liberal MEP Javier Nart, and was rejected by the five deputies of Unidas Podemos, the three of JxCat, the two of ERC and the deputies (one per party) of IU, PNV and Bildu.
The MEPs of Unidas Podemos (Pedro Sánchez’s partner in the coalition government) justified their vote against with the argument that “the political conflict in Catalonia” should not be “judicialized” and should be “resolved by political means and through dialogue”. In the same vein, the spokesman for Unidas Podemos in Congress, Jaume Asens, stated that “voting against removing the immunity of Puigdemont, Comín and Ponsatí was voting against the judicialization of politics”. In response, the Socialist Iratxe García, president of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament, declared in a press conference after the vote that “it will be Podemos who will have to explain why it has taken the decision not to cooperate with justice”.
The new internal discord in the coalition government joins many other controversies generated in recent times. Among the most resounding are the declarations offered a month ago to the newspaper Ara by the leader of Unidas Podemos and second vice-president of the Government, Pablo Iglesias, in which he affirmed that in Spain there is not full democratic normality because “of the leaders of the two parties that govern Catalonia, one is in jail and the other in Brussels”.
To further complicate matters for Pedro Sánchez, Gabriel Rufián, parliamentary spokesman for one of the pro-independence parties that supported him in the investiture vote, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), threatened yesterday to withdraw his support for the coalition government. “If they continue like this they will end up celebrating it in their homes, and not in Moncloa”, he declared during a press conference in Congress, in which he also did not avoid criticizing Unidas Podemos. “It is tiring to see that some of this Government make very nice tweets denouncing the situation (of the prisoners)” without doing anything concrete during the meetings of the Council of Ministers, he lamented.
As for the rest of the reactions, Arancha González Laya stated that the decision of the European Parliament launches a “triple message”. “The first message,” she said, “is that an MEP cannot take advantage of his or her status” to refuse to appear before “national courts for possible violations of national legislation.” In addition, the European Parliament sends “a second message of strength of the rule of law in Spain, of respect for the work of the Spanish justice system”, and makes clear, and this is the “third message”, that “the problems of Catalonia are solved in Spain, not in Europe”. “This is precisely the line that the Government of Spain has been maintaining, reaching out to all the Catalan political forces to seek a solution to the problems of Catalonia through dialogue and negotiation, and this is the message that today we also received from the European Parliament”, she added.
For his part, the president of the PP, Pablo Casado, denounced via Twitter that “the partners of the Government of Sánchez vote against lifting the immunity of Puigdemont to prevent him from answering to the Spanish justice for striking a blow to legality and national unity, but they have not succeeded”, and the president of Ciudadanos, Inés Arrimadas, described the vote as “great news and great triumph of democracy” and declared that “the values of the EU are contrary to nationalism and its attacks on the rule of law”.
As expected, Carles Puigdemont harshly criticized the outcome of the vote. “Today is a sad day, we have lost immunity, but the European Parliament has lost even more, it has lost European democracy.” In any case, he warned, “despite the pressure of the Spanish delegations, 42% of the Europarliament has not seconded this way”. “They have achieved what they wanted, they have lifted our immunity, but at what price?”, added the former Catalan president, who also announced that he will appeal the request before the European Court of Justice. For his part, Puigdemont’s lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, qualified the decision of the European Parliament and was convinced that Belgium will again deny the extradition of the former president and the former consellers.
Belgium
The result of the vote does not force Puigdemont, Comín and Ponsatí to lose their seats in the European Parliament nor will it imply their automatic extradition, but it will allow the European Arrest Warrants that were paralyzed after collecting their acts as MEPs to be restarted. Therefore, the fate of the three Catalan politicians depends again on the Belgian justice, which last January definitively rejected a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) against the former minister Lluís Puig on the grounds that the Spanish Supreme Court is not competent to request it. For this reason, Judge Pablo Llarena has submitted a preliminary question to the Court of Justice of the EU to take a position on this decision of the Belgian justice and to delimit the cases in which extradition can be denied.
Precisely, the vote in the European Parliament coincided with a telematic meeting between the Minister of Justice, Juan Carlos Campo, and his Belgian counterpart, Vincent Van Quickenborne, during which Campo presented the new Liaison Magistrate to the Belgian authorities, the prosecutor Paloma Conde-Pumpido García. The Liaison Magistrate was created last December with the aim of “strengthening legal cooperation between the competent authorities and improving the knowledge of the respective legal systems”, according to the Ministry.
