There are not two different justices: There is no judgment to leaders who claimed freedoms but wanted to snatch them

The imminent start of the trial for the Catalan politicians responsible for the procés is being approached by the independentist movement as an opportunity, perhaps the last, to carry out a demonstration of force that allows the chimera of secession to be kept alive by de facto means. The leaders who will appear before the Supreme Court will not do so because their ideas are prohibited or because they have given voice to a people that can not express themselves, as they repeat with propaganda intention to justify with invocations to democracy the crimes against the rule of law that presumably they committed.



Guarantee systems, such as the one in force in Spain, exempt from duty the truth to the accused in any criminal case, but that does not translate into the obligation to validate the fallacy. In this sense, neither the democracy that the pro-independence leaders invoke with the pretension of being their oracles, nor the rule of law that they have tried to discredit without achieving it, cover the outrage they carried out during the months of September and October 2017 against the civil rights, the civil liberties, the representative institutions, and even the public spaces, of the majority of citizens of Catalonia who reject the program of secession. If in the next few days they will sit on the bench it is not because they have claimed as defenseless citizens a freedom that the Constitution does not deny to Catalonia, but for having tried to take it away as despotic rulers of the Catalans who do not agree with the independence creed.

A part of the accused has hinted at their intention to turn the days of oral hearing into a political process against the court that judges them, and, by extension, against the institutional system of which that court is a part. The idea that underlies this strategy is that European justice will leave in evidence the lack of independence of the Spanish. Of course, any citizen has the right to choose the defense he considers most appropriate in a court, be it technical or political. But neither of these alternatives allows the Spanish justice to be considered as distinct from the European one, since it is the Spanish system itself that establishes that the judgments of the domestic courts can be appealed in Strasbourg.

Contrary to what the independence leaders seem to suggest by confusing the existence of two successive instances with that of two different justices, Spain is not an authoritarian country that Europe will unmask, but a democratic country committed to the construction of that Europe, to which court may appeal if they wish. Those who have defended the subjection of the courts to the Executive are precisely them, as reflected in its disturbing articulated the law of transition to the Republic that made approve by a simple majority of the Parliament. It is from that law, as well as other crimes, that they will have to respond to a single justice that will start with the judgments of some courts in Madrid and Barcelona, ​​and conclude with another in Strasbourg.

Turning the trial into a spectacle, amplified by the eventual mobilizations to which President Torra so often resorts, more inclined to agitation than to the management of the Government, does not exempt the accusing party or the defending party from providing evidence. contrasted and use legal arguments according to the laws. Once the judicial process has begun, and each of its instances has been exhausted, the final sentence will not have fallen on any subjugated nation, but on political leaders who will have used the right of defense that assists them in a democratic system, or they will have squandered it.

https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/01/26/opinion/1548522383_207772.html