He former president The Generalitat Carles Puigdemont has filed an appeal for amparo before the Constitutional Court to apply the amnesty that denied the Supreme. The Juns leader asks to review the amnesty law and that he has led to reject applying it to the leaders of the process condemned or processed by embezzlement, as is your case. The appeal for the constitutional of the former Catalan president also includes the petition as a “precautionary” measure that he is immediately lifted that weighs on him in Spanish territory.
The appeal argues that “the risk of immediate detention, added to the absence of a firm conviction and the severity of the rights committed, justifies – technical and constitutionally – that the suspension of the national order of search, detention and income in prison dictated” is decreed without delay former president.
Puigdemont’s defense – in charge of the lawyer Gonzalo Boye – frontally questions the thesis of the supreme so as not to apply the amnesty to the crime of embezzlement, and understands that it contravenes the will of Parliament. And that is why the lifting of the arrest warrant is raised not as a precautionary measure – which would require a prior consultation to the parties before making a decision – but as a “precautionary” and immediate measure, that is, that it is requested without requesting allegations from the prosecution or the supreme itself.
The appeal explains that “the need for this measure is not only framed in a logic of precautionary guardianship against the risk of irreparable damage, but must be understood as a requirement of the principle of supremacy of the Constitution.” “Respect for this principle,” says the amparo application, “imposes on all public authorities – including the judicial one – the obligation to preserve the effectiveness of fundamental rights enshrined in their text.”
Puigdemont implies implicitly in his appeal the decision to exclude the embezzlement of the amnesty by the supreme because he understands that he can assume that this renounced the “active protection” of fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution. In this sense, the text presented by Puigdemont’s lawyer before the Guarantees Body ensures that the constitutional text “attributes to fundamental rights a structural centrality that conditions the validity of the set of the ordering, demanding from the courts not only a reading compliance, but an attitude of active protection in situations that may lead to their practical erosion”.
The appeal also states that the granting of the precautionary measure of lifting the arrest warrant “does not constitute an anticipation of the ruling of the appeal” but understands it as “an indispensable measure to prevent it from completely losing its purpose.” And emphasizes that the denial of this measure by the Constitutional would convert the amparo “into a sterile procedure against an effective deprivation of liberty, depriving the Constitutional Court of the real possibility of restoring the fundamental rights whose violation is denounced.” Puigdemont mentions that only if the immediate lifting of his arrest warrant is denied in the first instance as a precautionary measure, he should examine at least as a precautionary measure – he is once the other parts of the procedure – the same request – once heard.
In short, the lifting of the arrest warrant constitutes “a constitutional requirement linked to the defense of the parliamentary democracy model enshrined in the Constitution.”
Amparo’s request also analyzes other factors, underlining that in the case of Puigdemont “there is no criminal conviction, in fact, and the process is in the instruction phase.” It is added that, therefore, “the execution of an order of prison without having yet produced a trial with guarantees and in the context of a manifestly politicized and discussed cause before European instances and subject to the application of the amnesty law, it generates an early violation of fundamental rights whose protection requires the immediate adoption of precautionary measures.”
In addition, the appeal emphasizes that the Supreme Court should not have decided on the application of Amnesty Law to Puigdemont – he explains – because the competent for this issue would be in any case the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia. The defense has been using this approach since the beginning of the cause, and has claimed that the entire procedure must have been directed by this instance. On the other hand, – the writing argues – “the Supreme has been arrived a function that does not correspond to it: inapplying a current norm” and that fits the Constitution, as the guarantee organ has resolved. Therefore, the appeal considers that in the case of Puigdemont the right to effective judicial protection has been violated, because the amnesty is fully applicable to the crime of embezzlement. In addition, the right of political participation of the Juns leader – adds the resource – has been violated that the “National Active Detention Order already constitutes a direct and immediate coercion that prevents it from entering Spanish territory, developing political activities in their country or exercising the representation that has been entrusted by universal suffrage before the Parliament of Catalonia in conditions of equality”.
