The Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union, Jean Richard de la Tourplans to answer this Thursday the question on which the judicial future of the former president of the Generalitat largely depends Carles Puigdemont and the rest of the escapees for the ‘procés, or at least, of the attempts of the Supreme Court to try again to make them available to the Spanish justice system through new European orders issued against him. For this, it is key to know if a country of the European Union can deny the delivery of a claimed person to another Member State, because it considers that its fundamental rights were violated when requesting its delivery, who understands that it is not the competent court to act against that investigated.
That was the response that Belgium gave to Spain to reject the delivery of the one who was Minister of Culture Luis Puig and it was the trigger for the judge who instructed the case opened in the Supreme by the ‘procés’, paul larenaaddress several questions to the court of justice based in Luxembourg in order to clarify what can justify rejecting a euroorder taken by another member country.
De la Tour’s conclusions will obey his analysis of the allegations made by Puigdemont’s defense, which exercised Gonzalo Boyewho was the one who carried the greatest weight at the time of expose the arguments of their peers on the bench, and that of the rest of the fleeing. And also to the contrary, exposed both the Spanish prosecutor’s office and the State Attorney’s Office and the European Commission in the hearing that was held on April 5 at the court’s headquarters in Luxembourg.
at the end of the year
These conclusions are not the final judgment of the court, but they are not usually misguided with respect to the final criterion, which is normally issued a month later, although the president of the CJEU, Koen Lenaerts, stated in a subsequent visit to the Spanish Constitutional Court that the final ruling will not be known until the end of the year. That will be the moment the dispute between Spain and Belgium on account of the European orders will be brought to a definitive endbut the criteria set by the attorney general in his conclusions will be a very important clue to be able to predict where the balance will tip.
During the hearing held in Luxembourg, the prosecutor of the Supreme Court, Fidel Cadena, argued that the Spanish high court is the competent one to investigate the leaders of the ‘procés’, because according to what was established by the organic law of the judiciary, criminal procedure and the Statute itself, is to which the deputies of the Parliament answer for crimes committed outside of Catalonia. Hence, it denied any type of arbitrariness in the claim of the fugitives nor, therefore, any violation of their fundamental rights, the main argument used by Belgium to deny the surrender of Puig.
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Both the Lawyers of the Spanish State and the European Commission defended that a delivery can only be denied in the event of a systemic violation of rightswhich motivated one of the magistrates that make up the Chamber to be interested, during the final phase of the hearing, in whether that would prevent intervening before those that occurred in a timely manner and would go unpunished.
For his part, Lenaerts focused his questions on Puigdemont’s lawyer in the resolutions of the Constitutional Court that all its resolutions on the ‘procés’ have denied any violation of fundamental rights. The defense, on the other hand, argued that the Spanish high court never ruled on the specific case of Puig and insisted on the lack of jurisdiction of the Supreme to be able to claim him and the rest of the fugitives.