Our sentence

Article 117 of the Constitution proclaims that justice emanates from the people and is administered by the judges. Good day today to remember not to confuse the owner with the managers . The Spaniards, to outlaw despotism and promote freedom - you know, the issue of civilization -, we agreed that, from the cleaning of the common house, that is, from complying with and enforcing the law, very boring professionals were occupied called judges. The judges speak through sentences, reasoning chained on proven facts that conform to principles and procedures that have been refined over millennia. However, before knowing what we are all commenting on, many glossed it as a cowardly composer , while others, with the same intensity, qualified it as an example of persecution of political dissent . And so they have followed nothing more to know their content, before having material time, not to reflect on their arguments, but even to read it. But let's leave the enlightened and descend to the prosaic, using the glasses of a co-owner, and ask ourselves: Does this decision reinforce the institutional building or weaken it? Are we more or less protected? Are we freer or is there more risk of arbitrariness? And let's do it trying to put ourselves in the position of the ideal defendant, capable of maximum probity.

The Supreme Court, in addition to the undisputed crime - disobedience - and the "technical" crime - embezzlement - had to choose between three legal possibilities when judging the facts of September and October 2017: absolution, sedition and rebellion To condemn, the facts had to fully adapt to the crime by applying the normative and axiological criteria of a democratic criminal law; in case of doubt, the less burdensome response should be chosen for the accused; and neither the reasons of State nor the political considerations should have room, because the judges do not pass the laws, but they apply them.

In the sentence, the court has opted for sedition. No one doubts - or the accused - that their ultimate goal, secession without constitutional reform, is a prohibited purpose . There is also no doubt that the defendants used illegal, parliamentary and executive means. But there was about the presence of a violent uprising. To defend that the defendants had urged and contemplated a decisive violence for the achievement of the prohibited purpose, it was necessary to stretch the events artificially, making algaradas not especially truculent - compare it with what happened in France with the so-called yellow vests , for example - in the seasoning That completed the type. But the violent uprising is not a spice in the rebellion; It is its fundamental ingredient , paella rice. The Supreme Court establishes it clearly: violence in the rebellion must be instrumental and functionally adequate to produce, by itself, the forbidden purpose. By itself, do not forget this adverbial phrase. In fact, the court has gone further - in the only relevant point that I do not share - and has proven that the false referendum was not seeking secession, but blackmail , so the intentional element would also be lacking. The judges, for this, have been based on the testimonies of secessionist politicians, on that of the lehendakari Urkullu on the last days of October 2017 and on the behavior, say, little heroic of the accused and the escaped after the application of art. 155 of the Constitution.

On the contrary, the facts do adapt naturally and without forcing sedition. The defendants used the mass as a deterrent against the State . They pretended - with a blunt mendacity - that they would try to avoid what they were instigating and instigated what they did not want to prevent: a scenario in which the backbone was bent to the courts . Something especially serious because they were also the State! In fact, the ruling reaffirms the special duty of public authorities to guarantee the prosecution of illegal activities, especially if they are aimed at energizing the institutions. It has not been proven that they wanted and represented a violent uprising as a lever for secession, but it is described in the sentence a myriad of facts, impossible to interpret otherwise as a whole, which accredit the design of a complete seditious plan, anchored in disloyalty and the desire to prevent or hinder the work of state servants , which was deployed throughout the Catalan territory. The defendants' ultimate beliefs about the achievement of the final objective, the tragicomic nature of their wanderings and the possibility that they could be aware, from a certain moment, that they were pedaling on an imaginary bicycle, are nonated for this purpose. As it does not matter - despite the fact that I find it hard to believe that they did not live in the delirium of the impending secession in view of so much urbi et orbi infatuated demonstration before the sinking - if they thought that the sperpenthus would facilitate their personal careers, if they cracked at last time or if they sought from the beginning to create an advantageous scenario for a "negotiation" with the State, as the court declares. What matters is its nuclear contribution in the creation of a tumultuary scenario of massive ignorance of the law and the decisions of the courts.

This is a sentence of enormous flight, clear and orderly, that responds extensively and reasonedly to all allegations of alleged violations of fundamental rights . Almost half sentence deals with this matter. In fact, the analysis of the supposed right to decide, which refutes, for those who want to read it without ideological earmuffs, the indigestible paste that secessionists have been selling for years, will become a reference text for its overwhelming brilliance.

In Marbury v. Madison , the most momentous case in the history of American law, the president of his Supreme Court, John Marshall , politically involved in the controversy, achieved the feat that a government act declared valid and illegal - a quantum right of the nineteenth century - served to give birth to a ubiquitous vaccine: by attributing to the court the power to declare the unconstitutionality of any law, it established in marble the supremacy of the written democratic constitution . The ruling answered the rhetorical question "Why do we limit powers and why did we do it in writing, if those affected by those limits can ignore them?" establishing the maxim of John Adams : "A nation governed by laws, not men."

This famous episode constitutes another page of the secular confrontation between democracy and dictatorship, often manifested as cultural warfare. Many, in so many places and times, have disguised their wet tribal and ideological dreams, truffled by that sinister arithmetic that lights the torches of the majority tyranny, dressing them as the purest expression of democracy. This insidious transvestism is fought insisting a thousand times that there is no direct democracy - not even the referendum is - there is no democracy without procedures , there is no democracy without limits , and there is no democracy without written law and without democratic control . When the ruler seeks to legitimize himself by auscultating the beating of the people, that only he is able to interpret, fueling frustration and instincts, to overflow his legitimate power and attribute original abilities, expropriating rights and ignoring the limits that flange and rationalize the discussion of political and social conflicts, reproduces, once again, the millenary easy path that has caused so much evil in the history of men.

As I said at the beginning, this is the remedy that civilization was given to avoid that evil. The remedy is not the concrete decision, but the moral authority to dictate and enforce it . Every sentence can be discussed, this one too. The unquestionable thing is that it is ours. Of all the Spaniards . It is dictated by the operators, but it belongs to us.

Tsevan Rabtan is the author of Atlas of good and evil (GeoPlaneta, 2017).

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• Supreme Court
• France
• Catalonia independence
• Opinion
• 1-O trial

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