The Prosecutor's Office of the Supreme Court opposes the claims of the former Catalan minister Clara Ponsatí that a new request be made to the European Parliament before she can be arrested to appear before the High Court.

In a report sent to magistrate Pablo Llarena, instructor of the procés, the prosecutors of Sala Javier Zaragoza and Fidel Cadena remind Ponsatí that "the claim that a new request be released to the European Parliament prior to the issuance of an arrest warrant is out of place and lacks any legal support. The request is not conditio sine qua non for the issuance of personal precautionary measures, but for the continuation and substantiation of the procedure with respect to the aforado, when he has not been previously accused or prosecuted by the competent court.

In the allegations, formalized against the appeal filed by Ponsatí when Llarena released her last March, the representatives of the Public Ministry recall that "parliamentary immunity cannot be conceived as a personal privilege, that is, as a particular right of certain citizens who were thus favored over the rest. "

The report, known by EL MUNDO, also stresses that "it is contradictory that the appellant invokes the applicability of article 71.2 of the Constitution to recall her immunity as an MEP against possible arrests or precautionary measures to which she may be subjected, and yet denies the competence of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court for her prosecution legally established in article 71.3 of the Constitution. Both legal provisions form part of the set of prerogatives and immunities of the parliamentary statute applicable to national deputies and MEPs."

Similarly, prosecutors criticize the legal distortion that the MEP tries to make of immunity when "the very nature and purpose of the prerogative of the

immunity, which is none other than to prevent the criminal process from being used to alter the composition and functioning of a legislative chamber."

Likewise, the members of the Public Ministry recall that the presentation as a candidate of Ponsatí to the elections to the European Parliament held on May 26, and her recent election as a result of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, "have already been prosecuted and having previously escaped from Spanish justice, so she was fully aware of the limitations that her procedural situation entailed in the effective exercise of her rights. politicians; from which it can reasonably be inferred that what she really intended was to avail herself of the protective mantle of immunity that, in her opinion, granted her the election as an MEP in order to obtain freedom and avoid criminal proceedings through this channel. "

Finally, prosecutors Zaragoza and Cadena highlight that, contrary to what Ponsatí defends maintain in their appeal, "there is no objective, verifiable and reliable data or element that demonstrates the existence of systemic or generalized deficiencies in the Spanish judicial system."

The Prosecutor's Office also defends that the repeal of the crime of sedition "does not equate" to a decriminalization of all the events that took place in Catalonia in September and October of 2017 "nor does it entail the decriminalization of the facts that motivated the conviction for that crime". "On the contrary, the need for retroactive application of the new law as soon as it is favorable to the defendant forces us to examine the possibilities of subsumption of the same facts in the current criminal types, so that only if any of the facts did not fit into the new regulations, it would be possible to speak of decriminalization, they conclude.

  • Clara Ponsatí

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