Carles Puigdemont, former president of the Generalitat of Catalonia who fled from Spanish justice, assured this Saturday that “no law”, in implicit reference to the amnesty that he is now negotiating with the PSOE, speeding up the deadlines, will end “the repression of the State” to the independence movement. And he also maintains that unilaterality is a valid tool to confront those who validate “skipping the rule of law” to safeguard the “sacred unity of Spain”, mentioning the Judiciary. The Junts leader and MEP made these statements before the territorial assembly of the Council of the Republic (a private body that he himself leads from Belgium) and which met in Elna (France).
This was the second public appearance of the founder of Junts per Catalunya after the Supreme Court opened an investigation on Thursday for an alleged crime of terrorism against him, also coinciding with the final stretch of negotiations in Congress to approve the law. of amnesty. The MEP is also one of those who benefited from the measure, and could put an end to his flight of more than six years in Belgium, where he fled to avoid being brought to justice for the events of the process. “It is evident that a new stage is coming, in which we can remove the burden of exile,” he said, but he predicted that “the repressive drive has not ended, it is more excited than ever.”
The independence leader and MEP has stated that the Consell has the duty to prepare “for unilateralism” and has assured that only the Parliament has the capacity to undo the unilateral declaration of independence (DUI) of 2017. And he has defended doing so “while the State Spanish does not democratically resolve the democratic demand of the Catalan people.” Puigdemont has assured that the main enemy of the independence movement is disunity and has encouraged the abandonment of “separate conversations.” For him, when the independence movement has been united, that is when it has achieved “extraordinary” results like 1-O.
“We have to confront that, of course. As long as the Spanish State does not resolve the democratic demand of the Catalans, we have the right to prepare for unilaterality,” said Puigdemont, who has managed to revalidate his primacy in the Council. On Friday, the former president He had avoided referring to the opening of the investigation against him, where the Supreme Court places him at the top of the Democratic Tsunami organization, the platform that called for protests against the sentence in the trial of process.
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“Those deep bowels of the Spanish State are capable of ignoring the rule of law, without giving explanations to anyone, in the name of a sacred thing that is the unity of the country,” said Puigdemont, referring to what he considers a manipulation of the facts to accuse him of terrorism and, thus, leave him out of the amnesty assumptions. In contrast, he added, there are others “who have a sacred thing called freedom and justice. And the confrontation is that confrontation of sacred things, which we cannot escape. We are not talking about the same thing, whoever puts the value of the unity of the country above freedom and democracy does not speak our same language. “That is the confrontation to which we say yes,” he said.
The Council of the Republic is one of the parallel structures to the autonomous Generalitat designed by the independence movement in 2018, although in practice it has functioned as a space for symbolic representation and without effective powers, chaired by Puigdemont and viewed with enormous misgivings by ERC, which He feared that Junts would use him as a counterpower to the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès. This is a new stage that the Council of the Republic “has the obligation” to lead: “Everything we have done until now now makes all the sense in the world,” said the former president. In this new stage, Puigdemont said, it will be possible to “leave exile behind” and get rid of “the burden of repression that weighs on the heads of thousands of families.”
“With all the secret services chasing us, with all the phones tapped, with all the police fabricating reports and with all the judges shooting to kill,” The former president has concluded, few independence movements would endure “the offensive of one of the most powerful and repressive states that exist in Western Europe.”