after winning some minor court battles in Europe, Carles Puigdemont is closer to losing the one that is decisive for any escape from Spanish justice: extradition. Until now, the former Catalan president, who went to Belgium at the end of October 2017, had managed to circumvent Judge Pablo Llarena’s intention to extradite him. The same thing had happened with Antoni Comin and Clara Ponsati, who, like him, have since obtained the status of MEPs, and with the ‘former minister’ of the Generalitat Lluís Puig. However, the report released yesterday by the general counsel of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), Jean Richard de la Tour, makes it possible to predict a future decision of this court that may be adverse to them. Indeed, if the CJEU assumes, in a few months, the criteria put forward by the attorney general for deny Belgium the right to refuse European warrants issued by Spain, Puigdemont, Comín, Ponsatí and Puig may end up in Madrid, extradited, and tried by the Supreme Court.
Puigdemont himself and his lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, little given to admitting defeat, have been deeply disappointed for the report made public by De la Tour. Knowing that this report usually anticipates the final decision of the court, they know that they have the next legal battle very much in front of them. In fact, Puigdemont has had to resort to epic of ‘we will not give up’, in the absence of legal arguments. Boye has insinuated a line of defense that is as fragile as it is uncertain: to demonstrate that the Spanish justice system suffers from a “widespread failure”, and not only from the defects attributable to Llarena’s actions. With this, he tries to respond to one of the two central arguments of the attorney general, in the sense that it would only be possible to oppose a Euroorder if the issuing country had a “systemic deficiency” of its judicial system. Something that must be demonstrated, according to De la Tour, “through a global assessment, based on objective, reliable, accurate and duly updated data” of the existence of risks for any defendant. No international institution has appreciated this “systemic deficit” in Spanish justice.
Puigdemont will not be satisfied with the traditional pro-independence resource that seeks to equate Spain to Turkey or, at least, to Poland or Hungary. The most serious thing for him is the substance of the two arguments put forward by the general counsel of the CJEU. On the one hand, there are no consistent data that allow consider Spain as a non-democratic country. On the other hand, the Belgian justice system went too far when considering whether the Supreme Court was the competent body to judge the accused independence supporters. Something similar happened to Belgium a few years ago, when it denied the extradition of an ETA member involved in a murder. After seven years he had to agree to do so after a blow from the Council of Europe. The report of the General Advocate of the CJEU has the virtue of put order in the gibberish that derived from the decision of the Belgian justice, and also from the German that agreed to extradite Puigdemont, but only for embezzlement. It would not be logical that, faced with a matter of such importance as the trial of the ‘procés’, the justice of each country was not consistent with the existence of a European Legal Area that protects the European orders of any country where justice does not suffer from « systemic or generalized deficiencies”.