Ashley Cornell, email: [email protected]

Carles Puigdemont, José Manuel Albares and Pedro Sánchez, in a plenary session in Strasbourg. RONALD WITTEK (EFE)

The transactional amendment agreed by PSOE, Junts and ERC to give final approval to the proposed amnesty law for all those accused in the trial excludes from the clemency measure “acts that, by virtue of their purpose, can be classified as terrorism in accordance with the European Directive.” of 2017” and in turn “deliberately caused serious violations of the human rights regulated by Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights”, which relate to the right to life and the prohibition of torture, respectively.

This Directive classifies as terrorist offenses if they are committed for any of the following purposes: “a) attacks on the life of a person which may result in death; b) attacks on the physical integrity of a person; c) kidnapping or hostage-taking; d) massive destruction of government or public facilities, transportation systems, infrastructure, including computer systems, fixed platforms on the continental shelf, public places or private properties, which may endanger human life or cause great economic damage; e) the unauthorized seizure of aircraft and ships or other collective means of transport or goods; f) the manufacture, possession, acquisition, transport, supply or use of explosives or firearms, including chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, as well as the research and development of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons; g) releasing dangerous substances or causing fires, floods or explosions resulting in endangerment of human life; (h) the disruption or interruption of the supply of water, electricity or other essential natural resources, resulting in endangerment of human life.”

The agreed text, which will be approved tomorrow in the Judiciary Commission of Congress, is similar to the text rejected by the seven Junts deputies just over a month ago, although references to the Spanish Criminal Code have since been deleted in the chapter dedicated to terrorism. This cannot be amnesty.

The negotiators emphasize that the agreement reached “is in line with the endorsement of the Venice Commission and reaffirms the full compliance of the standard with the Constitution, European law and international jurisprudence, in order to make it an impeccable standard”. Also exempt from the amnesty are “crimes of torture, treason and corruption with personal gain”. The bill also rejects amnesty for any crime “resulting in a violation of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

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According to the authors, the agreed wording should facilitate the inclusion of all people involved in the independence process in the amnesty. To this end, the scope will be extended and brought forward to November 2011, as Junts claimed, so that all claims related to the Court of Auditors will also be covered (the text rejected by the independents in January covered a period starting on). January 1, 2012 and ended November 13, 2023).

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The new text will pass through the Judiciary Committee filter this Thursday and will be approved in the plenary session of Congress next week and then by the Senate over the next two months. The government hopes that the adoption of the law will finally bring to an end “a phase that has dominated political life in Catalonia and all of Spain for too long.”

In addition, in the administrative area, the return of the sanctions imposed remains excluded, although there will be exceptions for less serious sanctions imposed in matters of citizens' security and “which will be returned by the administration that imposed them, if there are grounds for it.” “Proportionality.”

The three groups of signatories to the agreement, which announced it at eight o'clock in the afternoon without revealing the formula reached, have decided to withdraw the remaining amendments to the text that they had submitted.

A complex procedure

The proposal for the amnesty law registered by the Socialist Group on November 24th was amended for final approval in plenary on January 30th, removing the reference to the fact that terrorist crimes would be amnesty without a final verdict. However, the Junts group, with its seven deputies, which demanded amnesty in return for supporting the inauguration of socialist Pedro Sánchez, rejected the final text of the law, which was sent back to the Justice Commission.

Junts then presented 11 amendments, which were again rejected in the plenary session with dissenting votes from PSOE and Sumar, among others. The two coalition parties in the government have defended that the text registered in Congress is “entirely constitutional” and that the text adopted by the Cortes will be “equally constitutional”. However, in the first trial, due to doubts about the constitutionality, they had to delete the reference to the fact that terrorist offenses that had not yet been legally convicted were eligible for amnesty. This elimination filled Junts with doubts, whose votes are crucial to the implementation of the initiative.

Among the amendments presented by Junts, those related to Article 2 of the bill, which regulates crimes that cannot be amnestied, stood out. The text, agreed by all factions of the investiture bloc except the Junts, excluded terrorist crimes from amnesty as long as they “manifestly and with direct intent caused serious human rights violations, in particular those provided for in Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights.” and fundamental freedoms and international humanitarian law.

Two days before the vote on this text, Judge Manuel García-Castellón, who has been studying the summary on the violent protests of the Democratic Tsunami Movement for more than four years, responded to the appeal of a person concerned and specified this in a decision that examined a in the Territorial terrorist crime that could not be amnesty according to the draft law.

Junts gave two reasons to defend the deletion of this section on terrorist offenses: “There is no legal obligation requiring the exclusion from amnesty of acts classified as terrorist offenses (…) and, moreover, this would “the abusive “Use” prevent the Criminal Code and the tools of the state to persecute the Catalan independents.” “As soon as the proposed amnesty law was published, procedures thought to be aimed at dismissals were reactivated,” recalled the change in the context of the summary the Tsunami Democràtic, where Judge García Castellón stood trial four years after the opening of the investigation – and has now achieved in the Supreme Court that former President Carles Puigdemont be charged with a crime of terrorism.

The Catalan separatists fear that after the opening of a criminal case for terrorism in the Supreme Court against Puigdemont, who has been a fugitive from justice since 2017, the courts will refuse to apply the future amnesty law intended to benefit all those accused or convicted of the illegal ones Independence challenges – both the so-called participatory consultation of 2014 and the referendum of 2017. The Supreme Court, contrary to the opinion of the Prosecutor of the National Court and the Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, has itself decided to support the reasoned statement of Judge García-Castellón to investigate , whether Puigdemont committed a terrorist crime as the alleged perpetrator of the protest movements that took place in Barcelona following the sentencing of nine independence leaders to prison terms. “During the entire period covered by the bill,” Junts emphasized in his amendment, “there is no act that can be classified as a terrorist crime. However, we note that there are at least two procedures (the tsunami crime). Democràtic and the Committees for the Defense of the Republic), in which Catalan independence fighters are arbitrarily and unjustifiably investigated and prosecuted for acts that should not be classified as such, but are classified as such.”

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