The Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) returns to judge as of this Tuesday the sovereignist members of the Parliamentary Table in the stage of Carme Forcadell for processing the laws of 1-O, after the Supreme Court annulled their sentence when appreciating the lack of impartiality of two magistrates, its president, Jesús María Barrientos, and Carlos Ramos.
Thus, the members of JxSí on the Parliamentary Table in 2017 Lluís Corominas, Anna Simó, Ramona Barrufet and Lluís Guinó, will sit again today in the dock after the Supreme Court annulled the 20-month sentence last November of disqualification imposed on them in October 2020 by the TSJC for disobedience.
The Supreme Court appreciated the lack of impartiality of Barrientos and Ramos, who, in the opinion of the Spanish High Court, had externalized in previous proceedings an explicit stance on key issues of the trial, for which reason it ordered a repeat trial with a court other than the one that sentenced. to Forcadell's comrades for their "stubborn" disobedience to the Constitution to allow the processing of the referendum and legal transitory laws approved on September 6 and 7 of that year in the Catalan chamber.
The court that will retry the pro-sovereignty members of the Table is made up of magistrates Fernando Lacaba, Francesc Segura and María Jesús Manzano.
Barrientos and Ramos were challenged and removed for lack of impartiality in the trial last October in which the TSJC ended up acquitting the former president of Parliament and current Minister of Business Roger Torrent and the pro-independence members of his Board -Adriana Delgado, from ERC , and Eusebi Campdepadrós and Josep Costa, from Junts-, after ruling out that they disobeyed the Constitution when processing sovereignist resolutions and disapproval of the monarchy in 2019.
The court argued in this case that the actions of the defendants were "absolutely different" from those of the Board of the Forcadell stage, because the resolutions they processed did not have "continuity" with respect to the "unilateral" process of independence that began in 2015.
The first session will start with the processing of the previous questions and with the statement of the four defendants and a session with the witnesses is scheduled for Wednesday, who already appeared at the hearing in July 2020, including the non-independence members of the Table José María Espejo Saavedra and David Pérez, the lawyers of the Parliament Antoni Bayona and Xavier Muro and the former president of the chamber Ernest Benach. The hearing will end on Thursday, March 16, after the reports of the parties and the turn of the last word.
In the 2020 trial, the defendants invoked their parliamentary inviolability and argued that they did not intend to ignore the Constitutional Court when processing the laws of the process but to guarantee the debate without "prior censorship".
On the other hand, the Prosecutor's Office, which requested a sentence of 20 months of disqualification, denied the existence of a "general cause" against the independence movement, as denounced by the pro-sovereignty members of the Table, and stressed that the defendants took their disobedience "to the extreme". in his unilateral path to break with the law in 2017.
In the sentence that the Supreme Court annulled, the TSJC concluded that the defendants disobeyed the Constitutional by admitting to process parliamentary initiatives with which "it was clearly intended" to develop the declaration of rupture of 9N of 2015, "culminating" with the laws of referendum and legal transience approved on September 6 and 7, 2017 in Parliament, "by calling an illegal referendum and the advent of a new state in the form of a republic".
In its annulled resolution, the TSJC dismantled one of the main lines of defense of the defendants, who claimed that they could not apply "prior censorship" by entering into the merits of the resolutions before they were debated in Parliament, and determined that they should have done so. , because after the declaration of rupture of the 9N of 2015 the Constitutional introduced a "nuance" in its doctrine that forced the Table to veto the "patently unconstitutional" initiatives.
