The imputation of the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont and the general secretary of ERC, Marta Rovira, for terrorism in the cause of Democratic Tsunami causes friction between the Prosecutor's Office of the National Court and the judge Manuel García-Castellón. The tension that has been created as a result of the magistrate's judicial decision in full negotiations on the amnesty has been evident in the State Attorney General's Office, where it has fallen like a bucket of cold water that the judge has taken a step forward without regard to their judgement.
According to tax sources, the case of Tsunami Democràtic – a movement that is being investigated to see if it was behind the riots in Catalonia after the judgment of the process dictated by the Supreme Court – which began in 2019 had suffered a halt. For months, a report from the Civil Guard was awaited to determine whether the case should continue in the National Court for terrorism or, otherwise, it should be sent to the ordinary courts of Catalonia.
The Prosecutor's Office had already announced that it did not consider the matter to be terrorist acts. For the prosecutor of the case, Tsunami could have been directed as a crime of sedition, since there were riots in critical infrastructures such as El Prat airport. However, when this crime disappeared after the last reform of the Penal Code promoted by Pedro Sánchez, the most compliant crimes, according to the public ministry, were public disorders.
This criterion had been advanced to the judge, despite the fact that he was waiting for the report from the Civil Guard to request a change of jurisdiction. However, according to fiscal sources, García-Castellón went ahead and issued an interlocutory order not only to clearly establish the crime of terrorism, but also to already charge a dozen people, such as the former president of the Generalitat, in full negotiations to push forward the proposal for an amnesty law that would benefit those charged with issues linked to the process since 2013.
According to fiscal sources, the representative of the public ministry is already preparing the appeal so that it is the criminal chamber of the National Court that decides whether Democratic Tsunami is terrorism or sends the case to the courts of Catalonia and the investigation falls to Puigdemont. This resolution is key in the amnesty because the judge is looking for more than a hundred injured people, such as policemen, to personify the cause, and even the link with a death, a tourist who suffered a heart attack . On the table, as the negotiations are going, there is amnesty for those accused of terrorism, but as long as there are no injuries or attacks resulting in death.
The judge does not agree with this criterion. He has taken into account a letter presented in the summer by the Prosecutor's Office in which he rejected the request of a defendant to send the case to Barcelona, under the argument that the events were being investigated for terrorism. The letter was signed by the prosecutor who was replacing the person in charge of the case during the holidays.
Fiscal sources explain that it was a procedural document and the colleague was based on the origin of the cause in which the crimes of sedition and terrorism appeared. However, the substitute judge was not privy to the details of the procedure. When he realized what had happened, the chief prosecutor Jesús Alonso sent a letter to the instructor to clarify that it was not the classification of crimes maintained by the Prosecutor's Office and based on the criteria of the same prosecutor of the case.
While the appeal is presented and the room studies it, the judge will proceed with the instruction. Just yesterday he received a letter from Puigdemont accusing him of carrying out a persecution. "It seems clear that the procedure from which the imputation derives is what in Anglo-Saxon terms is called lawfare".
