NO sooner had the European Court of Justice ruled that Oriol Junqueras had the right to parliamentary immunity from before he was jailed than Spain took its first act of revenge, banning Catalan President Quim Torra from public office for 18 months.
This is the first time in modern history that a sitting Catalan president has been disqualified.
The Catalan High Court also imposed a fine of €30,000 (£25,500) for the crime of disobedience after he refused to remove yellow ribbons – a sign of solidarity with Catalonia’s political prisoners – from the headquarters of the Catalan government in the run-up to the Spanish general election in April.
Spain’s Central Electoral Board (JEC) issued the removal order, which said the ribbons were “partisan” and set a time limit for them to be taken down.
During his trial last month, Torra admitted that he “disobeyed” the JEC because it was “neither competent nor superior” to the president of the Generalitat [Catalan Government].
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He said: “I disobeyed. It was impossible to enforce an illegal order. Every member of this ward knows it. It was an illegal order issued by a body that had no authority to issue it.”
The yellow ribbons became a symbol of solidarity with the Catalan leaders who were tried and sentenced to almost 100 years in prison by the Supreme Court over the independence referendum in 2017.
Following their arrest after the indyref, they were kept in “preventative detention” until their trial in May and people sympathetic to their cause started wearing yellow ribbons or hung them from buildings, many of them public.
In a statement yesterday, Torra said that while Europe exemplified “how justice is done”, Spain was continuing on the “path of repression”.
He said: “The ruling issued today by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia demonstrates yet again the lack of concord between Catalan democratic legitimacy and Spanish law, particular as it is used by the state.
“In the face of this clash of democratic legitimacy, we can never retreat in our defence of the rights gained by generations and generations of Catalans who have fought hard to win them.
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“The exercise of democracy, with full freedom of expression, does not belong to any president of the government of Catalonia; it belongs to all Catalan people. That’s why, as the holder of this office, with the dignity it entails, I cannot yield or sacrifice any of the social, civil and political rights of Catalan citizens.”
Torra said a government led by the Socialists had not stopped Spanish repression and “the blank cheques and advance payments achieved nothing”. He said the ruling was issued before his trial, and added: “We will lodge an appeal with the Supreme Court, where we will again raise the technical issues and the reference for a preliminary ruling that the High Court of Justice refused to submit.
“The ruling announced today is a highly political one. Its sole purpose is to ban me from public office and, by so doing, stop me from doing anything about the political situation in Catalonia.
“This justice is not blind or impartial; it’s partisan and completely unfair.”
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