The Prosecutor's Office has filed an appeal before the Supreme Court (TS) where it asks to repeat the trial held in the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) against the members of the Parliamentary Committee chaired by the now Minister Roger Torrent for disobedience to the Constitutional Court (TC), when processing parliamentary resolutions related to self-determination and which disapproved of the monarchy, considering that the acquittal was "absolutely arbitrary".
The document supposes formalizing the appeal that the Public Ministry already announced days after knowing the sentence that last November exonerated Torrent and the former members of the Parliamentary Committee Josep Costa, Eusebi Campdepadrós and Adriana Delgado, who were tried between 5 and on October 7 for allegedly disobeying the Constitutional Court when processing said parliamentary resolutions.
Prosecutor Antonio Pablo Rives asks to annul that acquittal and repeat the trial but with a different court, "so that other magistrates of that court, not contaminated, that is, who have not had contact with the object of the process or have adopted decisions on the same, are those who decide on the merits of the matter".
Rives alleges that the right to effective judicial protection has been violated, citing Supreme Court jurisprudence according to which "allows judicial decisions based on non-rational evaluative criteria to be annulled, or separated from all logic or alien to any parameter of sustainable interpretation in law" . And "such is our case," he says.
In this sense, the prosecutor indicates that the assessment of the evidence made by the TSJC, "which excludes the 'intent' of disobedience and acquits the defendants", "is absolutely arbitrary, alien to the maxims of experience, the rules of the logical and, finally, it is far from the constitutional canon".
Remember that the TSJC acquitted by concluding that "it cannot be said that the accused were aware of and wanted to disobey the mandate of the Constitutional Court, which was not clear and specific, with more than one interpretation being possible derived from the sentences themselves", in this case that "they only wanted to talk about self-determination as a mere political proclamation, for the future, but without the intention of materializing it in a new legislature".
Faced with this, the prosecutor emphasizes that "it is the Constitutional Court itself that appreciates (...) that the Parliament of Catalonia has once again violated the constitutional and statutory order, by admitting the resolution proposal to the Board of the Chamber response to the judgment of the Supreme Court on the events of October 1" of 2017.
For Rives, "this demonstrates the clear content of the mandate of the Constitutional Court and the will of the members of the Board of Parliament to oppose it, which constitutes the crime of disobedience charged, the acquittal being the product of a mere decisionism separated from logic and maxims of experience, which violates the right to effective judicial protection".
Thus, it emphasizes that "the orders of October 10 and 16 and November 12, 2019, issued in the incidents of execution against the Resolutions of the Parliament of Catalonia 534/XII of July 25, 2019 and 546/XII of 26 September 2019, the defendants were notified individually and personally and their text left no room for doubt, especially when three of them (Torrent, Costa and Campdepadrós) are people with legal training".
"The obligation to which all of them were required, to prevent or paralyze any parliamentary initiative that would mean ignoring or evading the agreed suspension, warning them of the possible responsibilities, including criminal, which they could incur in case of non-compliance, could not offer nor did he offer any doubt, either in terms of his compliance or in terms of the consequences of the contrary," he says.
Rives reproaches that "what the defendants did, consciously and voluntarily, previously agreed, with unity of purpose and action and a clear desire to disobey, was to admit the resolution proposals for processing and reject the reconsideration of their admission formulated by the representatives of the non-independence parties of the Table of the Parliament", for which reason he rules out that "they can hide behind unrealistic allegations of vagueness, imprecision or ambiguity".
However, it understands that said acquittal "frontally contradicts the doctrine of the" Constitutional Court, "forgetting that it is the TC itself that, in its orders 9/2020 and 11/2020, of January 28, after declaring the admission unconstitutional and void The processing by the Board of Parliament of the resolutions of October 22 and 28, 2019 and November 8, 2019, orders the deduction of testimony from individuals for alleged disobedience against the accused".
