The General Court of the European Union restored on Tuesday May 24 the immunity of MEP of the former president of Catalonia Carles Puigdemont, acceding to a request from his lawyers who welcomed “a temporary victory“.
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In an order communicated to the press, this court established in Luxembourg “suspends the execution of decisionstaken on March 9, 2021 by the European Parliament concerning Carles Puigdemont, Toni Comin and Clara Ponsati. That day, this assembly had voted to lift the immunity of the three MEPs, who are also former members of the Catalan executive prosecuted for “seditionby the Spanish courts since the attempted secession of the region in 2017.
European arrest warrants
Toni Comin and Clara Ponsati – also settled in Belgium after going into exile in Scotland at first – were in October 2017 two “ministersof the regional government led by Carles Puigdemont, when an independence referendum was organized despite its ban by Spain. They were quickly the target of European arrest warrants issued by the Spanish courts, which they challenged before various courts in their country of exile. All three were elected to the European Parliament in May 2019.
On Tuesday afternoon, one of their lawyers, Simon Bekaert, praised on Twitter “a temporary victoryafter the order giving them back their MEP immunity. “This is not a substantive decision.“, we explained to the General Court of the EU, but of the cancellation of a previous “interim order“(taken urgently, editor’s note) of July 2021 against which the lawyers of the Catalans had appealed. On July 30, the EU Court rejected the request to suspend the lifting of the parliamentary immunity of the three separatists, considering it unlikely that the Spanish mandates would be executed by another EU country.
Welcomes “a new positive result”
Turnaround on Tuesday: the risk of an arrest with a view to being handed over to Spain does exist because the three officials are still “reported” in the police files (or SIS II information system) shared by the countries of the Schengen area, notes the Court. “As the applicants claim, the existence in SIS II of alerts on persons wanted for arrest for the purpose of surrender entails, in principle, in itself, an obligation to arrest of the persons targeted by such reports“, can we read in the order.
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Carles Puigdemont, 59, who has lived in Waterloo south of Brussels for four and a half years, welcomed “a new positive resultobtained in his legal fight against Madrid. “We must fight every day and everywhere for freedom. We will continue to do so, despite the uncertainty and even if the strength of the Spanish state is colossal“, he wrote in a tweet punctuated with the hashtag “No surrender“.
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