The return to Spain and arrest of the former Minister and MEP Carla Ponsatí since she left after the unilateral declaration of independence of Catalonia at the end of October 2017 leaves several doubts about her future and whether it is comparable to what could happen with the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont. Here we try to clarify some of those issues.
Clara Ponsatí, together with Marta Rovira, has been, in judicial terms, the great beneficiary of the repeal of the crime of sedition and thus made it valid yesterday by being able to return to Spain without any risk of being imprisoned. Of the five declared in absentia in the case of the procés, only for them two the prison sentence has disappeared and they are only now prosecuted for a crime of disobedience, which carries a sentence of disqualification of up to two years.
The crime of embezzlement of public funds does not weigh on Ponsatí. The ruling of the Supreme Court by which Oriol Junqueras and eight other pro-independence leaders were sentenced for sedition, already certified that from the Ministry of Education for which she was responsible there was no diversion of public funds to organize the referendum on October 1 in 2017.
Therefore, once the sedition has been repealed, the option of prosecuting them for a crime of public disorder has been discarded, as the Prosecutor's Office intended, and the embezzlement removed, Ponsatí's judicial future does not involve ending up in a prison.
After the last order of the investigator of the case, Pablo Llarena, in which he limited his prosecution to disobedience, his return was a matter of time, just like Rovira's. The magistrate has no other idea than to summon her to take a statement, release her and agree to the opening of an oral trial so that she is tried for disregarding the orders of both the Constitutional Court and the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) to stop the disconnection laws and call off 1-O.
A very different situation is that of former president Carles Puigdemont, Toni Comin and Lluis Puig. About them if he plans the real risk of ending up in preventive detention until the trial is held in the hypothetical case that they decide to return. Their battle over parliamentary immunity is lost, at least within the Supreme Court, once Llarena has warned that this privilege cannot be applied once they were processed before being appointed MEPs
In his last resolution on March 21, the instructor already resolved the doubts raised by the defenses about the legality of maintaining active arrest warrants against MEPs. Llarena explains that the European Union treaty, regarding the operation of immunity in Spanish territory, attributes recognized privileges to members of the national Parliament.
It adds that, since the appellants were prosecuted in March 2018, the immunity they achieved on June 13, 2019 on the occasion of their proclamation as elected members of the European Parliament, does not require the request for a request for the adoption of the measures adopted.
Despite his position on immunity, the magistrate maintains that in the event that in the future the defendants are materially deprived of liberty in Spain, if it is considered justified and effective to maintain their imprisonment beyond the time required to receive their statement , the authorization to attend the different parliamentary meetings would not be excluded (as the CJEU contemplates), as long as their immunity had not been suspended.
