Taking up the position of the Committee on Legal Affairs (see EUROPE 12664/16), the European Parliament approved on Tuesday 9 March the waiver of the parliamentary immunity of the three Catalan MEPs Carles Puigdemont (400 votes in favour, 248 against, 45 abstentions), Toni Comín and Clara Ponsatí (in both cases: 404 in favour, 247 against, 42 abstentions), accused of sedition in Spain.
The majority vote in favour of lifting immunity was cast by the EPP, S&D and Renew Europe groups, while the Greens/EFA and The Left groups to which the Podemos movement, a member of the governing coalition in Spain, belongs, voted against it.
“We have lost our immunity, but the European Parliament has lost even more than that, as a result it has also lost European democracy”, was the reaction of Carles Puigdemont. The three MEPs will now appeal against the decision to the General Court of the European Union.
On behalf of the S&D Group, Spain’s Iratxe García Sanchez, a member of the ruling Socialist Party, said she was “very pleased” that a “large majority [of the European Parliament had] voted in favour of Spanish justice doing its job”. It is not up to the European Parliament to say whether the Spanish judiciary is doing its job well or badly, she added, convinced that “in Spain, all the guarantees of respect for the law exist”. According to her, Podemos will have to explain why its representatives in the European Parliament voted against cooperation with the Spanish judiciary.
The EPP Group takes this line. Within the Renew Europe group, it is argued that parliamentary immunity in the European Parliament was designed to protect an elected official from prosecution or persecution in connection with his or her mandate as an MEP. However, it is added that the acts for which the three Catalan independentists are accused predate their election.
In its report, the Parliament states that it has no competence to assess or question the competence of the national judicial authorities responsible for the criminal proceedings against the three Members. As the alleged acts of sedition were committed in 2017, it cannot be said that the judicial proceedings were initiated with the intention of damaging the future political activity of the three leaders as Members of the European Parliament, since their status as MEPs was still hypothetical and future, it added.
The position of the group The Left is quite different. “We are concerned about this vote. For us, the debate is not about the independence of Catalonia, but about the political dimension of the proceedings initiated by Spain. The fault of these elected representatives is that they wanted to keep democracy alive in Spain”, stated the Frenchwoman Manon Aubry. She stressed “the unprecedented nature” of a process in which many Spaniards took part, and which will set “a precedent, if the European Parliament is not able to protect the freedom of expression and politics of its members”.
On behalf of the Greens/EFA group, Belgium’s Philippe Lamberts called on Monday for a political solution to the political conflict in Catalonia, with an important condition for this being to avoid “the continuous judicialisation of politics”.
It is now up to the Belgian judiciary, in the case of Mr Puigdemont and Comín, and the British judiciary, in the case of Ms Ponsatí, who moved to Scotland before settling in Belgium, to decide on the European arrest warrants issued by the Spanish judiciary and which had been frozen since the three MEPs took office.
According to the newspaper El País, the Spanish Supreme Court is going to apply to the Court of Justice of the EU to obtain legal guarantees on the functioning of the European Arrest Warrant after the Belgian judiciary refused, at the beginning of 2021, to extradite a fourth Spanish independence fighter, Lluís Puig, in exile in Belgium, but not having been elected to the European Parliament.
See the European Parliament report on the request for waiver of Mr Puigdemont’s immunity: https://bit.ly/3eoET8r (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion with the editorial staff)