Madrid (EFE)
The appeals chamber of the high court has rejected the appeals of Puigdemont and former ministers Antonio Comín, Clara Ponsatí and Lluis Puig against the decision to maintain their prosecution, agreed by magistrate Pablo Llarena.
And it has done the same with the Vox appeal, which exercises popular prosecution, which asked to add the crime of aggravated public disorder to replace the crime of sedition, repealed by the reform, on the understanding that the elements of both types of offenses are different.
There was no “public disorder”
“The defendants deployed and promoted civil disobedience and an institutional insurrection aimed at altering the constitutional order, without any call for violence, not public disorder through violence,” says the Chamber.
The magistrates thus follow the line established by the court that judged the pro-independence leaders, which a few months ago refused to classify the events as public disorder and explained that the embezzlement reform does not alter the prosecution for this crime, nor should the events be included in the new fixed attenuated subtypes, which are committed when there is no profit motive.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, they intend to “procedurally mess up the matter to raise new battles”
At the appeal hearing, the ex-president’s defense asked to annul the national arrest warrants and revoke the prosecution of Puigdemont and the ex-consellers so that “the procedure can be adapted to the reality created by the executive and legislative powers” because “no one is responsible of the mess of a deplorable penal reform”.
In his opinion, the indictment had become “outdated” and obsolete due to “the passage of time and some facts” such as the sentence in the process and the penal reform that repeals sedition and modifies the crime of embezzlement, which has placed this procedure in “a scenario of procedural imbroglio”.
But the Prosecutor’s Office responded that the only thing that the rebels wanted was to “combine the matter more procedurally to continue raising new battles” in the courts when “all this procedural impasse has not been the work of the court, nor of the Prosecutor’s Office or the Lawyers, it has been the work of the appellants”.