The legal representatives of ERC, the ANC and Òmnium Cultural have denied this Wednesday in a trial having organized the act held in front of the Lledoners prison (Barcelona) in which a man was seriously injured when he fell down a slope that was not marked and by the one who has sued pro-independence entities and parties.
"We gave it support but we did not organize it", the representatives of ERC, ANC and Òmnium have repeated in different versions in the civil trial held this Wednesday in Court 57 of First Instance, in which Junts per Catalunya (JxCat) is also sued but to which no one has appeared to represent the formation.
The fall suffered by Carlos R., who is being tried in the hearing, goes back to an independence act of protest against the arrest of the politicians in the process, held on November 2, 2018, in front of the Lledoners prison.
As explained in the lawsuit filed by Carlos R, he attended the event that day and, when it was over, when he returned to the car park that had been set up in a field adjacent to Lledoners, he walked away towards some trees to urinate and, turning behind from one of those trees, he fell down a slope that he did not see due to the lack of light, since it was 7:00 p.m. on a November day. Due to the fall, he was hospitalized for 14 days and suffered several injuries and sequelae for which he requests 21,000 euros in compensation from the ANC, Òmnium, ERC and JxCat, whom he considers to be the organizers of the event.
However, the trial has focused on deciding whether it was really the pro-independence entities and parties that organized the event, an extreme that they deny.
On the poster calling for the act, at the bottom it reads "Organizes: Adic" (which responds to the acronym of Assembly for the Defense of Catalan Institutions) and just below the logos of the ANC, Òmnium Cultural, ERC, JxCat and the PdCat.
However, the alleged organizing entity, ADIC, has not been summoned in the trial or sued because when the court tried to contact it, they realized that it did not appear in any public record nor is there any official trace of it.
Given this, the lawsuit has been directed against the ANC, Òmnium, ERC, JxCat and the PDCat, who have denied that their support for the mobilization was "material organization" but that it was "moral and symbolic". "We were contacted by the organizer, the ADIC, and we gave them support, but we did not organize anything or pay any expenses," said the ERC representative, Jordi Lapiedra, summoned as a witness at the trial.
On behalf of the ANC, Elisenda Paluzie, who was president of the entity at the time of the events, explained to the judge that between 2017 and 2018 Adic organized numerous events and that they joined the one on November 2 in Lledoners as they had done other times. "I don't know what the structure of the Adic was", commented Paluzie, who has denied that this was a front entity used to call mobilizations and avoid the possible responsibilities that would derive from it.
Finally, in the final reports, the plaintiff parties and entities have claimed that the responsibility for the injuries cannot fall on them because they did not organize it, and they have even accused the plaintiff of having a "little diligent attitude" in the fall by not seeing the slope.
On the contrary, Carlos R.'s lawyer has defended in his report that an act "cannot be organized and financed by an entity that does not exist", has accused the defendants of not providing their accounts for the year 2018 to hide the hypothetical expenses of the event and recalled that today a wall has been built in the area that prevents a similar fall and that this demonstrates the danger of the slope.
The trial has been seen this Wednesday for sentencing.
