Those convicted by the Supreme Court for their participation in the ‘procés’ have initiated a new defense strategy, aimed at removing the magistrates who, due to their criminal experience, were in charge of coordinating their resolution from the resolution of their appeals.
First the impartiality of Antonio Narváez was questioned , who ended up leaving, and now it has been that of Cándido Conde-Pumpido , whom, first the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont and this same Monday the leader of ERC Oriol Junqueras, want to expel from review of your convictions.
In his case, his impartiality is considered affected by an intervention he made during the 40 years of Spain’s entry into the Council of Europe and by being a friend of the prosecutors of the ‘procés’ Javier Zaragoza, a circumstance that is common among magistrates and prosecutors and more considering that Conde-Pumpido was attorney general of the State.
High court sources point out to EL PERIÓDICO that this argument was also used in the Supreme Court with the attorney general who filed the complaints that gave rise to the procedure, the late José Manuel Maza, and it was rejected by the ‘procés’ court, but They prefer to wait and see how this “war of objections” that was lived in the Constitutional with the Statute evolves, although then the ground was paid by the fracture that existed between the magistrates themselves
The challenge of Conde-Pumpido, as happened with that of Narváez, was led by Puigdemont and the ‘ex-councilors’ who accompany him on his flight, Clara Ponsatí, Toni Comín and Lluís Puig . This Monday Junqueras and Raül Romeva joined her .
The magistrates, aware that this incident delays the most optimistic expectations that they wanted to have all the appeals resolved before the summer, want to see how many of the convicts finally join and see what matters it affects to adopt a definitive position on the matter, but for now they do not consider that their arguments deserve the aforementioned magistrate to withdraw.
Mundó and Serret
At the moment, the Constitutional Court has only resolved two of the appeals for protection presented: that of Meritxell Borràs and Carles Mundó, as they are the only ones who were only convicted of disobedience and, therefore, their challenges are the simplest.
The judgment that dismisses Mundó’s appeal supports his sentence of a 10-month fine with a daily quota of 200 euros and a year and a half of disqualification, because “when the Government, of which he was a member as counselor of Justice, approved the call for a referendum on self-determination and issued complementary rules on its development by means of decrees, the Court Constitutional had already declared unconstitutional and void the resolutions of the Parliament that urged the Government to make such decisions if the use of the channels established in the Constitution was excluded “.
The Constitutional Court thus dismisses Mundó’s complaint, which maintained “the lack of evidence of the prosecution on the disobedience that has been attributed to him”, because it did not know at that time “the unconstitutionality of any unilateral claim to initiate a constitutional process in favor of creation of an independent Catalan State in the form of a Republic “.
The sentence also rules out that his fine was not justified. It explains that “the individualization of the daily fine imposed has been carried out on the basis of indicative criteria of the appellant’s economic capacity from the relevant level of salary income that he has been obtaining during the exercise of the position of counselor of the Government of the Generalitat “that” exceeded the sum of 110,000 euros per year ”.
