The judicial complaint that Torres-Dulce will file this week
following the insistence of the PP has great political importance, since
the Spanish authorities are taking the self-determination conflict one
step higher by taking the President of Catalonia and 2 members of the
Catalan Government to court. Furthermore, such a step is likely to cause
a significant boomerang effect in support of Mas, Ortega and Rigau by a
large part of the Catalan society. Many citizens and organisations are
likely to stand apart from their main public representatives who
co-organised an historical and peaceful citizen participation process,
in which 2.3 million people cast an official vote on independence from
Spain for the first time in history.
An important symbolic vote
In fact, November 9’s participation process was the first time ever
that Catalans were able to directly vote about their belonging to Spain,
since the 1978 Constitution had been negotiated with Franco regime’s
military and was the only way to embrace democracy and bury the
dictatorship. Many citizens, particularly old people who had lived
through the Civil War and the four decades of Fascist and military
dictatorship in which the Catalan language was persecuted, were thrilled
and touched to be able to vote on independence, even if it was in a
symbolic and non-binding process run by volunteers.
The Catalan Government launched such a participation process after
the Spanish Executive managed to have the original consultation vote
suspended by the Constitutional Court in a particularly fast and
provocative way that, once again, questions the separation of powers in
Spain. Then, in order not to disobey the Court, the Catalan Executive
designed this alternative process, which was initially downplayed by the
Spanish authorities and many Catalan parties for not being serious
enough. The Catalan President acknowledged the limitations of the new
way and highlighted that it was far from being the definitive
referendum, but he insisted that citizens would be able to vote, “with
ballots and ballot boxes”. He also talked about being “astute” and not
disclosing all the organisation steps in order to make things harder for
the Spanish Government and prevent them from blocking this new vote. In
addition, the vote would be run by volunteers, without a pre-made
electoral census, although it would be carried out in public venues in
an official way.
A vote with wide institutional support in Catalonia and total opposition in Madrid
The main civil society organisations supporting independence backed
the new citizen participation process and so finally did the rest of
parties supporting the previous consultation vote. Furthermore, 942 of
the 947 existing municipalities in Catalonia backed the alternative way
and offered their facilities to host polling stations in the event that
Catalan Government ones were not enough.
At this point the Spanish Government changed its mind and activated
the mechanisms needed to block the new vote from happening. It managed
to have the Constitutional Court temporarily suspend November 9’s
process, but it was not able to stop the vote from happening in the end,
despite it having threatened organisers and participants in the
immediate days before the vote and on the very same November 9. The
Spanish Public Prosecution Office announced on Saturday, the day before
the vote was supposed to take place, that it was opening an
investigation and it did not rule out legal consequences. In addition,
the Catalan Government’s websites and those of the main pro-independence
civil society organisations suffered a massive cyber-attack on the
vote’s weekend, which collapsed their systems for several hours. The
attack represented 90% of all the attacks in Spain and on November 9 it
multiplied by 60,000 the regular information requests to the Catalan
Government’s servers.
However, the citizen participation process was a great success,
considering all the obstacles and threats, even those sent at the last
minute. On top of this, an international and cross-party delegation of
observers formed by Members of the European Parliament and other
parliamentary chambers certified that the process had been “correct” and
“open”, taking place without coercions. They also acknowledged the
limitations imposed by the Spanish authorities and the “challenging”
circumstances in which it had been carried out, and concluded that it
had been “successful”.
Rajoy and the PP are using Spain’s main institutions in a partisan way
Mariano Rajoy and the PP have held an absolute majority at the
Spanish Parliament since late 2011 and have been ruling the country
imposing their own views without dialogue, including those on Catalonia
and Spain’s territorial organisation. In fact, they have been violating
the current legal framework by invading the Catalan Government’s
jurisdiction on many occasions, by recentralising powers with the excuse
of fighting the economic crisis and by refusing to negotiate a new
inter-territorial fiscal scheme despite the old one having legally
expired and despite all the demands from all business associations from
Catalonia and Catalan public representatives. On top of this the PP and
Rajoy have begun homogenisation initiatives and have attacked the
Catalan language, not respecting the Spanish Constitution that
specifically calls for the protection and promotion of minority
languages. Moreover, the PP and Rajoy have used their absolute majority
to impose a restrictive interpretation of the Constitution and to ignore
or downplay the democratic self-determination demands expressed by a
large part of Catalans, through many peaceful demonstrations and through
the last elections to the Catalan Parliament, held in November 2012.
Back then, with a record turnout, citizens freely elected 80% of MPs who
ran supporting a legal self-determination referendum.
The Catalan President and a wide majority of Catalan parties have
been working to honour that democratic mandate and to grant citizens the
possibility to vote on their collective future. The attitude of Rajoy,
the Spanish Government and the PP, but also of the Spanish Socialist
Party (PSOE) and most of Madrid’s establishment, has been to block any
negotiation about self-determination demands for the last 2 years. On
top of this, Rajoy and the PP have undertaken a no-to-everything
attitude that is looking to quash Catalonia’s demands by KO, in the hope
that Catalans will give up on their demands without they are having
made any political concession. In front of this, Catalan representatives
have agreed not to wait any longer for Madrid to sit around the table
and talk about a mutually-agreed referendum. In December 2013,
two-thirds of the Catalan Parliament agreed to hold a legal
self-determination vote on November 9 in which citizens would answer a
two-part question that referred to independence but also to a federal or
confederated Spain. They tried to bring the Spanish authorities on
board, insisting that the question wording and date could be
renegotiated, but Madrid’s blocking attitude continued. It was when the
Spanish Parliament refused to transfer the powers to organise a
self-determination referendum to the Catalan Government and when the
Spanish authorities banned Catalans from using their own legal framework
to hold a non-binding consultation vote. However, in the end, they
could not stop citizens from giving their opinion on independence on
November 9.
A reaction from Spanish nationalism
The image of Catalans casting their vote on independence in a
peaceful and even festive way shocked Madrid and most of the Spanish
nationalists. Rajoy had repeated that the vote would not happen and
finally it did. The most conservative and Spanish nationalist factions
of the PP, but also of other parties, criticised Rajoy for being too
soft with Catalonia. The Spanish PM took three days to appear in public
for the first time after the vote and to make an assessment of it. In
front of the criticism, Rajoy downplayed the vote and its turnout, and
he accused the Catalan President of having organised an “illegal”
process, even though no Court had declared the vote to be “illegal”, not
even the Constitutional Court. He also rejected the offer made by the
Catalan President to talk about the self-determination demands and
negotiate a mutually-agreed referendum.
Before Rajoy’s statements, other members of the Spanish Government
and the PP had said similar things. In addition, on Monday the PP
already announced that the Public Prosecution Office would file a
judicial complaint against the Catalan President and other member of the
Catalan Government. The Public Prosecution Office had not made any
statement in this regard.
The show of the Public Prosecution Office
This complaint has been a political soap opera that has lasted the
past 10 days, in which the PP and the Spanish Government publicly asked
the Director of the Public Prosecution Office to act – sometimes in
quite a demanding way – and, at the same time, they were hypocritically
denying having put any pressure on Torres-Dulce. On Wednesday last week,
Torres-Dulce met with his delegate in Barcelona, José María Romero de
Tejada, in order to agree on a line to take and gather the support from
prosecutors based in Barcelona. They agreed to put the final decision on
whether to file the request or not in the hands of the Catalonia-based
prosecutors.
Last Monday, the 9 prosecutors that form that highest public
prosecution council in Catalonia unanimously agreed to reject the
complaint because they considered it lacked legal basis. However,
Torres-Dulce announced he would organise a meeting on Wednesday with
Spain’s main prosecutors in order to carry it out anyway. With this
move, the Spain’s General Prosecutor proved he was putting the decisions
in the hands of Barcelona-based officers to gather their support and to
pretend that the complaint had been filed for legal reasons and not
because of political instructions sent from Madrid. On Tuesday the
Catalan prosecutors said they would file the complaint if they were told
to do so, since they belong to a hierarchical body. Therefore, the
rebellion of the Catalan prosecutors did not become a schism in this
basic pillar of the Spanish legal system. Meanwhile, the PP and the
Spanish Government were insisting that Torres-Dulce should react and
file the complaint at once. On Wednesday, the council grouping Spain’s
main prosecutors, from high courts and heading specialised law divisions
(many of them belonging to a conservative association) backed
Torres-Dulce after a 4.5 hour meeting, although not unanimously. After
the meeting, the Director of the Public Prosecution Office confirmed
that the complaint would be filed “within this week”.
A complaint against Mas, Ortega and Rigau for 4 felonies
In the end, after speculation about who exactly will be targeted, the
complaint will be not only against the President of the Catalan
Government, Artur Mas, as the main person responsible for the vote, but
also against the Vice President, Joana Ortega, who coordinated the
vote’s logistics and announced turnout figures and early results, and
the Education Minister, Irene Rigau, who authorised using public
high-schools to host polling stations. The will be accused of
“usurpation” for having authorised a “hidden referendum” despite not
having had the powers to do so; “disobedience” for not having respected
the temporary suspension of the Constitutional Court; “embezzlement” for
using public money and resources for the vote; and “perversion of a
legal process” for carrying out a public administration process in the
knowledge it had been temporarily suspended by the Constitutional Court.
However, many legal experts consider that there are not enough legal
bases for such accusations. Firstly, the vote was not “a hidden
referendum” but “a citizen participation process”, which the Catalan
Government has the powers organise. Secondly, it is hard to argue that
they committed “embezzlement” by using public resources in a process in
which 2.3 million citizens participated, clearly showing the public
interest of such a process. Thirdly, according to Spanish legislation,
in order to disobey a court the court has to have sent a reminder or a
warning, in addition to the original verdict, which was not the case.
Finally, “perversion of a legal process” requires public officers to
have consciously made an unfair decision, which does not really fit into
a citizen participation process run by volunteers.
