The amnesty bill is moving full steam ahead towards its approval in Congress. The text will be ready this Tuesday in the Justice Commission of the Chamber, ready for the plenary session to give it final approval on the 30th, a month and a half after having taken it into consideration. Then only the Senate process will remain, where the PP announces that it will deploy all kinds of delaying maneuvers. But even so, a delay of more than two months is not expected, so Congress could approve it definitively around the month of April.
The text that will come out of the commission is outlined, although ERC and Junts insist on their amendments that aim to eliminate the part in which those convicted of terrorism are excluded from the possibility of benefiting from the amnesty. The PSOE maintains its refusal to accept them for the moment, but the conversations between both parties continue. The socialists allege that it is the European conventions that prohibit the granting of pardons to those convicted of terrorist actions resulting in death or serious injury. But the Catalan separatists are looking for additional protection against the pertinacity with which some judges such as Manuel García-Castellón, of the National Court, intend to accuse former president Carles Puigdemont and the general secretary of ERC, Marta Rovira, of terrorism, both of whom have fled abroad. blaming them for some of the riots that occurred in 2019 in Catalonia, during the protests against the Supreme Court ruling that sentenced the rest of the leaders of the process
The new spokesperson for the PSOE executive, Esther Peña, implied this Monday that her party is only open to introducing technical changes to the text of the bill, such as those contained in the amendments approved last week with the support of the two formations of the Government and all their allies from the peripheral nationalist formations. Peña, in any case, defended the amnesty as a way to move towards a “more complete democracy” by recovering those who, “for one reason or another, had to leave in 2017” after the illegal independence referendum was held in Catalonia. If the ERC and Junts amendments are rejected this Tuesday, both parties can still keep them alive to be voted on in next week’s plenary session.
The final procedure of the Justice Commission will serve to initiate a new public debate on the amnesty. With all certainty, the PP will return to the report of the lawyers of said commission that questions whether the legislative proposal fits into the Constitution. The popular leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, went so far as to insinuate this Monday that Spain “no longer has a Constitution” because its citizens “are not equal before the law.” The PP’s offensive against the amnesty has not given up one bit and is going to intensify in the coming weeks. In addition to the obstructionist maneuvers in the Senate, Feijóo has also asked his mayors to get involved in the campaign to denounce the pardon measures for the Catalan independentists.
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