Clara Ponsati She has returned to Spain and, as was absolutely foreseeable, she has been arrested. It was foreseeable because magistrate Llarena had ordered it so again in his order of March 21, 2023, and this, although it is Member of the European Parliament and the crime for which she is now charged is disobedience, which only carries fines and disqualification, but not prison. This is the custom in the courts of many states – far from it all –, also in Spain, when the person summoned to appear before a court does not appear voluntarily. Therefore, I insist what happened was foreseeable beyond all reasonable doubt.
Different is that it is justifiable. In the first place, it must be remembered that any prisoner has the right to remain silent, and therefore, making him appear by force if he has already publicly warned that he is not going to say anything makes no reasonable sense, as much as it is forensic custom that will have to change one day, by the way. All the more so if the crime charged does not carry prison sentences. In this case, Clara Ponsatí has publicly stated that she does not recognize the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Although this statement is only an exordium that lacks any legal relevance, what is foreseeable after expressing it is that she remains silent in her interrogation or that she only makes some political statement, also without any relevance to the investigation. Under these conditions, her deprivation of liberty is irrelevant. Yes indeed, if there is an arrest warrant, the police must inexcusably comply with itso that arrest is completely unavoidable for the agents.
But also, in this case it is a member of the European Parliament who enjoys immunity. What does that mean? Here opinions differ. Judge Llarena estimated in the recent aforementioned order that this immunity does not prevent detention based on an accusation prior to assuming the status of deputy, since the criminal proceedings already pending do not stop due to the fact that the defendant becomes a parliamentarian, which is logical but not to the extent explained by the magistrate. And it is that the Court of Justice of the European Union, in its judgment of December 19, 2019 -the Junqueras case– considered very clearly that immunity implied the lifting of a provisional prison measure, providing that if even so the Spanish court believes that this deprivation of liberty should be maintained, “it must request the European Parliament to suspend said immunity as soon as possible& rdquor ;. In other words, that immunity prevents the deprivation of liberty, also if that deprivation of liberty occurs in Spain. Consequently, in the opinion, not mine, but that of the Court of Justice of the European Union, Ponsatí should not be arrested.
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Perhaps he would have avoided his arrest if he had gone directly to Madrid, as they did with the same accusation Meritxell Serret and Anna Gabriel. Maintaining his deprivation of liberty would only be possible if magistrate Llarena now made new accusations against him, and this, although theoretically possible, would not be even moderately serious since only a week ago he insisted that Ponsatí’s only accusation was for the crime of disobedience and for none else, while recalling again the Spanish legislator’s reform of the crime of sedition, which left the events of 2017 in “a context close to decriminalization & rdquor ;, as he said in January. It would be arbitrary for a “repenalization & rdquor; creative through other criminal figures that have not yet appeared at any time in the investigation, which is already more than five years old and even has a final sentence that convicted most of the inmates in 2019, today pardoned.
The defenses of Puigdemont, Comín and Puig are going to use what happened to reaffirm, not only before the Belgian courts, but also before the General Court of the European Union, his usual allegation: that Spanish justice does not respect fundamental rights. And what happened today is not a good precedent for you not to believe them.