Junts per Catalunya has imposed a vow of silence at first after the announcement by Pedro Sánchez during an interview on La Sexta that this Friday they will register a proposal in the Congress of Deputies to change the crime of sedition in the Penal Code to that of aggravated public disorder, so that the typification is comparable to that of other European countries.
It has been the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont who has broken it and who has set the position of his party. The MEP, who is the former president of the formation, has warned that with a substitution of one crime for another and not a derogation, and if the independence leaders can be prosecuted in court for the same acts, "there is no political benefit".
A reading full of conditionalities, cautions and reservations that contrasts with the optimistic and satisfied tone of President Pere Aragonès and Esquerra Republicana, who attribute the Prime Minister's announcement to the discreet work of his negotiation with the central Administration. According to Puigdemont, the head of the central executive and the second vice president, Yolanda Díaz, "talk about reforming crime." "Some celebrate it and sell it as if it were the repeal of the crime, but it is not the same," she warned.
"In the end, what counts are not the announcements but the facts. Any accusation for the events of October 2017 that is made under the protection of the crime reform would be the demonstration of a deception," said the leader of Junts, who believes that "if the crime is really abolished, there can no longer be conviction or prosecution".
“If you are sentenced to prison for organizing and calling an independence referendum, what difference does it make if it is 15 years in prison or five: they are criminalizing a right,” Puigdemont stressed in a chain of messages on the social network Twitter.
"If October 2017 ceases to be a case of sedition and becomes a case of aggravated public disorder, I will not see where the political benefit of all this lies," added the former president, who admitted that there is "a great difference between spending 15 years in prison and spending five. "But politically we would be in the same place," he added.
In his opinion, “the individual benefit (spending less time in prison) does not lead to political benefit. "Nothing would be dejudicialized," concluded the former Catalan president, who has lived in Belgium for five years and is waiting for what the European courts rule on his case, with various open fronts.
"If our comrades who spent four years in prison could now be sentenced in the same way - even if it were to shorter sentences - the judicialization of the conflict would remain intact. Fewer years in prison does not mean fewer trials or fewer causes. It means less time in prison" , has reflected.
In addition, the also former president of JxCat has pointed out that it is convenient to "read the large and small print very well" because "the 'Sánchez announcements' are never what they seem". “He is a master of the art of deception, but we already know the tricks and we must take all precautions. Let's remember the gag law and Catalan in Europe…”, he asserted. "We will see", has been the message that he has launched at the end of his argument.
In Junts, during all this time in which the possibility of reforming the crime of sedition has been contemplated and it has been talked about in the media, they have defended that their position was to repeal the crime and not reform it, as he had pointed out Puigdemont himself spoke to Sánchez a few weeks ago when he said from Brussels that they kept in their plans to undertake a reform as soon as it had parliamentary support. "What you have to do is repeal it. And not take the opportunity to introduce new tools that allow you to persecute and sentence behaviors that in European democracies, such as Germany, are considered freedom of expression. What do we know of you, frauds, "he snapped then the independence leader to the Prime Minister.
