Madrid, Mar. 1, (dpa/GNA) – The Spanish Supreme Court has initiated criminal proceedings against Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont on terrorism charges, overruling the attorney general on Thursday who had denied such proceedings.
Puigdemont, who lives in exile in Belgium after a failed attempt for Catalonia to separate from Spain in the autumn of 2017, is suspected of having been involved in the organization and leadership of the Tsunami Democratic protest group, the court said in a statement justifying its decision on Thursday.
The group’s activists, who largely acted anonymously, had organized protests in 2019, some of them violent, against the sentencing of Catalan separatist leaders to long prison sentences for the illegal independence referendum held on October 1, 2017. The court explicitly referred to a blockade of Barcelona airport by thousands of demonstrators in mid-October of 2019.
Members of the Tsunami Democratic movement had committed serious crimes against freedom and physical integrity as well as other offences, the judges wrote. There were numerous indications that Puigdemont had played a leading role in the protest movement, they said.
Spain’s opposition People’s Party (PP) welcomed the decision. “The rule of law cannot be bought,” the secretary general of the conservative PP, Cuca Gamarra, was quoted as saying by the El Periódico de España newspaper.
Only last year, the PP had tried in vain to obtain votes from Puigdemont’s Junts party for the election of its leader as prime minister, which failed.
Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court might hamper plans by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, head of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), to grant amnesty to Puigdemont and other Catalan separatists.
Sánchez pledged the amnesty and made other concessions to the separatists in exchange for their support in a vote in parliament in mid-November that allowed him to form a government following a snap election in July.
GNA