CATALAN president Quim Torra is seeking an “urgent” meeting with acting Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez to discuss the closing stages of the trial of independence leaders and a UN report that called for the release of some of them.
Amongst Torra’s concerns is the accusation made by a prosecutor in the Supreme Court on Tuesday that the referendum and declaration of independence in 2017 was a “coup d’état”.
He will also raise recommendations by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) that three of those on trial for their part in the independence drive – former vice-president Oriol Junqueras and activists Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart – should be released immediately.
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Torra told Catalan channel TV3: “At this moment the prosecutor tells us that we are a criminal organisation. They are asking us for more than 70 years in prison for our peers, we have people in exile and repression does not stop, like what is happening to court number 13. This is the that problem we have to solve.”
He said his government wanted to negotiate with Spain, but said he had conditions: “That we can speak of the right of self-determination, that the Spanish government exposes what it wants for Catalonia and that there is a figure like the speaker.”
Torra said the trial and potential sentences were a “turning point” in his legislature, and he had started a round of meetings with political parties and organisations to “seek unity”.
Elected MEPs the exiled former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and his ex-minister Toni Comin, meanwhile, have managed to get inside the European Parliament building in Brussels after being refused entry last week.
They were invited in on Tuesday by current Catalan Democrat MEP Ramon Tremosa, “as the free European citizens they are”.
Their objective was to meet MEPs they already knew and to establish contact with other political groups in the run-up to the official opening on July 2.
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Puigdemont and Comin were stopped from collecting their temporary accreditation last week. Given the election results last month, Puigdemont said they were “not mere invitees, but members of this chamber and demand to be treated the same as the other members”.
He expressed regret that that didn’t happen last week, that instead they were “discriminated against”.
Elsewhere, the Spanish parliament’s speaker Meritxell Batet has said the suspension of four jailed and suspended Catalan MPs will not affect the total number of seats in the house.
A parliamentary majority in the 350-seat house would continue to be 176 seats, she said. Removing the seats would have allowed Sanchez to broker a majority in parliament without relying on the Catalan pro-indy votes, which he is now likely to require.
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