Spain: Supreme Court judge twists words to justify charges of rebellion against pro-independence leaders

MadridBefore sending five Catalan elected representatives back to prison, Pablo Llarena used his judicial statement on the charges against 25 politicians and leaders of pro-independence grassroots organizations to reconstruct an alleged legal narrative that goes back to 2012, with Artur Mas' victory in the Parliamentary elections, and attempts to present a "meticulous ideation" of a strategy of confrontation with the Spanish government.

Although most of the events described —from the creation of Catalonia’s Advisory Council for the National Transition, to the publication of the "White Book for the National Transition", to the approval of Parliamentary resolutions— were public and well-known, and were not contested at the time by Spain’s criminal justice system, according to Llarena's reasoning they were part of a perfectly crafted conspiracy and thus can be construed as crimes of rebellion, disobedience, and embezzlement.

In 69 pages, the Supreme Court judge presents a meticulous account of each and every one of the main events in Catalan politics, with special attention to the events of September 20th outside the HQ of Catalonia’s Ministry of Economy —which the judge characterizes as violent in order to justify pressing rebellion charges—, and to the October 1st referendum. But Llarena dedicates many pages to justifying the convoluted reasoning used to attribute this violence to the indicted. Justice Llarena admits that Supreme Court jurisprudence "characterizes violence by its physical nature, by personal expression, and for its appropriateness". That is, that violence must be "of a physical nature", requires "the use of force", and must be exercised against "a person". It also must have "sufficient intensity to bend the will of those against whom it is directed".

Word-twisting

None of these conditions are given in the magistrate's text, where only the "capacity for intimidation" of the crowds that had gathered on September 20th is referred to as violence. He notes that Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart climbed on top of two Guardia Civil patrol cars, and describes in detail the situation of the police officers injured during the October 1st referendum (and assigns responsibility for this violence to those who gathered outside the polling stations).

Llarena's convoluted reasoning is semantic. As the facts don't fit the accepted definition, he establishes a difference between "violence" and "acting violently", which is "doing something in a violent manner, which does not present a typical content fully in agreement with acting with violence". This is a twisting of the dictionary that assumes that the adverb "violently" has a different content than the noun "violence". This, despite the fact that the official dictionary of the Spanish language defines "violently" as "in a violent way", without any additions or qualifications.

According to the judge, however, "acting violently" is outside the classic definition of violence that judges use, and allows it to be "projected onto material things". In his version of the events, Llarena justifies this alleged violence with the events of September 20th, in which "the crowd acted with massed force", "destroyed police vehicles, and attacked personal property", and goes further and states that their actions "restricted the ability to act as a consequence of the use of force", and compares it with "the taking of hostages by firing shots into the air".

The judge admits that the violence was not "planned from the beginning as an instrument for achieving independence", although he notes that investigation of this must continue. He notes that they "accepted the risk of a clearly representable violence" by encouraging people to demonstrate despite the deployment of police forces. That is, again, and as he has done in previous writings, Llarena lays the blame for the police violence on those who were its victims.

No mention of "Enfocats"

The document "Enfocats" (Focused) had become the main piece of evidence in the majority of briefs issued by Llarena up to now. The judge based his justification for the the defendants’ participation in the process of rebellion on the annotations found in this PowerPoint file in the home of Josep María Jové, Oriol Junqueras' deputy at the Ministry of Economy. The weakness of this evidence had been made evident by defense teams on various occasions. Llarena practically ignores it in this accusatory brief, and instead targets the "White Book" put together by the Advisory Council for the National Transition as the touchstone that initiated the independence process, and which describes the steps that followed, which he uses to justify charges of planned and coordinated action. The references to "Enfocats" now are down to three mentions in footnotes.