IN the 2002 film by Steven Spielberg, Minority Report, the precogs were capable of predicting intentional crimes, but not non-intentional acts. That proved to be a failing policy when several innocent people were framed and eventually punished by death for crimes they didn’t commit.
The Spanish State has been playing precog lately. In its latest grotesque line, the Public Prosecutor filed charges against Carme Forcadell, president of the Catalan Parliament, and three other members of the Parliament’s Board for the chamber’s referendum resolution, and omitted Joan Josep Nuet, third secretary of the board, for his “unwillingness to join in the political project to break away” from Spain. In other words: Nuet will be spared from the wrath of the State because he is not an independence supporter.
In my book, this qualifies as a charge – or a discharge – for intentions.
The story starts back in 2010, when a Spanish Constitutional Court rule considered that a significant part of the Catalan Statute of Autonomy (regional constitution) was incompatible with the 1978 Spanish Constitution, despite having been approved by the Catalan and Spanish parliaments, and by the Catalan citizens through a binding referendum vote in 2006. Then came seven years of a pacific political conflict that the Spanish State insisted on treating with judicial instruments.
Those instruments were gracefully provided by a justice system that is more and more dependent on the government ruled by the Popular Party. Spain is at the lower end of the EU in terms of judicial independence. Despite the State’s frequent complaints about this affirmation, reality is stubborn, and Spain occupies a shameful 85th place in the latest World Economic Forum’s Judicial Independence Ranking. This position is much worse than the one Spain had in 2013 (60th).
Since the pro-independence movement started, more than 400 judicial proceedings have been opened against the Catalan Government, local and district authorities, as well as elected representatives.
What are the charges? Democratic actions such as permitting a parliamentary debate, promoting a non-binding consultation on the political future of Catalans, sometimes even just waving a flag outside the town council. Something is very wrong with the Spanish democracy. And it’s getting worse.
Such behaviour is the result of a clear inability to negotiate and is leading to an utterly irrational situation.
And now, in an extreme act of clumsiness, the Public Prosecutor thinks he can precog the intentions of Nuet to break or not the “inviolable unity of Spain”.
A judicial prosecution not based on facts — but instead on ideas - goes against human rights, contradicts the very Spanish Constitution that the prosecutor so earnestly defends, and reduces Spanish Democracy to the level of a carnival: grotesque and ridiculous.
Montse Daban is International Committee Chair of the Catalan National Assembly
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