The Minister of Foreign Affairs and the European Union, Meritxell Serret, will be judged by the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) on March 29 for disobedience within the cause of the process for her performance as a member of the Government that organized the referendum outlawed on 1-O. This is what the Catalan High Court has agreed to in an ordering process dated today.
The minister herself has revealed the summons for the 29th of this month on her Twitter account and after that she has assured that "the repression does not stop me and I continue to do politics and defend the republican and independence project." "We are here to be useful to citizens and to build a freer Catalonia" she added.
The date of March 29 is just one year after the Supreme Court, which investigated the case and tried and sentenced the main defendants in 2019, decided to open an oral trial against the one who was Minister of Agriculture in 2017 for a crime of serious disobedience and agreed to send the case to the TSJC as it is the competent body for prosecution, since no charge had been made against her for a crime of embezzlement of public funds.
The Republican politician turned herself in to the Spanish justice in March 2021 after spending four years in Belgium following in the footsteps of the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont. In May 2021, the examining magistrate of the case, Pablo Llarena, concluded the case regarding Serret, after it was handed over to the Spanish justice system in March of last year when it had been in Belgium since 2017.
The instructor explained in his resolution that Serret was prosecuted for disobedience and embezzlement, although in the end she was not accused of this second crime since it was not indicatively accredited that specific payments were made from her department for the organization of the 1-O referendum. In addition, it was taken into account that the defendants who were tried in the same situation were convicted of a crime of disobedience and acquitted of the crime of embezzlement, and for that same reason no European Arrest Warrant had been issued against her after the sentence. of October 14, 2019 since the crime of disobedience does not carry prison sentences.
This facilitated the return of the minister to be a deputy for ERC in the Parliament of Catalonia after the February 2021 elections. After turning herself in, Llarena agreed to her provisional release without precautionary measures, thus annulling the national search and capture order and his rebellious situation.
