Setback for Santos Cerdán. The Constitutional Court (TC) has rejected the former Socialist leader's appeal for protection of constitutional rights, which sought the suspension of the pretrial detention he has been serving since June. According to the high court's statement on Monday, the decision was made unanimously by its members at the proposal of the reporting judge, José María Macías Castaño.

Having exhausted all avenues of appeal before the Supreme Court, Santos Cerdán's defense team is now taking action and turning to the Constitutional Court to secure the release of the former Socialist party member from Soto del Real for his alleged involvement in the corruption scandal at the Ministry of Transport. His lawyer, Benet Salellas, filed an appeal for protection on Wednesday, requesting the Supreme Court's investigative judge's decision to remand him in pretrial detention without bail. Judge Leopoldo Puente made that decision. to prevent Cerdán from destroying evidence of the alleged network to collect bribes on public works contracts that he allegedly organized with the rest of those involved in the plot. However, for the defense of the former PSOE organization secretary, this risk does not exist and, therefore, there is no justification for keeping him behind bars. For all these reasons, he demands his immediate release.

The strategy orchestrated by the political and judicial right to torpedo the amnesty has marked the first year of its existence, and its fruits will be seen in the first ruling issued by the Constitutional Court. The report prepared by the body's vice president, the progressive Inmaculada Montalbán, supports the constitutionality of the law but does not assess its application to the crime of embezzlement, which is what affects Carles Puigdemont and the rest of the leaders of the Process. In the nearly 200-page text sent to the other members of the court on Monday, the conflict opened in the Supreme Court with the pro-independence leaders is not addressed because no mention was made of the PP's appeal, which is what is now being resolved.

This Friday marked one year since the approval of the amnesty law in the Congress of Deputies, a bittersweet anniversary because while many people have already benefited from it—45% of those who have requested it, according to Òmnium data—there are also many requests that have not been granted. Among them are the police officers accused of bodily harm in connection with the 1-O referendum, and among the latter are the main political leaders of the process. The law is being debated in the Constitutional Court. Be that as it may, the law is making progress, but it is true that from a political standpoint, it will not have achieved its objective until former president Carles Puigdemont can freely return to Catalonia. A progressive majority should have this endorsement, but this will not mean its immediate application, since the Supreme Court considers that the law is not applicable to cases of embezzlement. A second legal battle will then open, which could also have a European scope if the Supreme Court submits a preliminary ruling to the CJEU. The amnesty, which is currently being implemented by its pro-independence partners, is now bogged down and without a clear timeline. It's possible that the amnesty won't be implemented until the end of the mandate, with the real danger that the legislature will end early and the new right-wing government will seek a way to torpedo it.

The ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that supports the right of the Constitutional Court to veto the processing of motions in favor of the right to self-determination or against the monarchy is undoubtedly a bucket of cold water and a reality check for the independence movement. It is true that the ECHR decision balances the rights of the deputies and the TC, but it also seems that the idea that European justice would end up giving the independence movement the right in all its cases against Spain has turned out not to be true. It is not so easy, therefore, for European judges to overrule a decision by the highest interpreter of the Constitution of a Member State.

Doubts have arisen after Catalonia's High Court announced it considers applying the ruling which forces schools to teach 25% of classes in Spanish a "legal impossibility". The professor of administrative law of the Universitat de Girona (UdG) Josep Maria Aguirre answers in four questions on the future of the legal case.

The Catalan Government plans to pay back €4.6m corresponding to the 24,295 fines handed out for breaking restrictions during the first lockdown. The Department of the Home Affairs will pay back once affected citizens fill out a form which is expected to be made available before Christmas. The operation still needs to be approved by the legal department, and the authorities have ruled out paying any interest on the sums, although experts are not certain this would be legal. The method chosen to return the fines paid (just 17% of those given) tries to respond to one of the consequences of the Constitutional Court's July ruling which declared the state alarm that allowed the lockdown void.

When on 14 July the twelve judges of the Constitutional Court (TC) overturned - divided and following an appeal by Vox - the first state of alarm decreed by the government of Pedro Sánchez to deal with the first wave of the pandemic, the newly elected Minister of Justice, Pilar Llop, appeared in public to show the discomfort of the Moncloa before the sentence. An unprecedented move until now, but one that showed that the battle between the coalition government and the Spanish right is not only being fought in the Cortes Generales, but that the courts are playing an increasingly important role. In the coming months, the TC has to resolve a battery of appeals filed by the PP and Vox that question regulations as relevant as the reform of the law of the Judiciary (LOPJ) or the law of euthanasia. The decisions that the high court will end up taking can dismantle fundamental axes of the policies of Sanchez's government.

The imminent defeat of the conservative majority in the Constitutional Court over Vox's appeal for protection against the Congressional bureau last Wednesday has led the rapporteur, Judge Antonio Narváez, who had proposed rejecting it, to reconsider his project and join his other five colleagues to form a majority in favour of the ruling. For this reason, the ruling on the appeal, according to sources consulted by ARA, has been postponed until the plenary session next October, which will also deal with the appeal by the ultra-right-wing party against the extension of the state of alarm for six months, after the declaration of unconstitutionality of the first lockdown last July. 

The sentence declaring the first state of alarm approved by the Spanish government in March 2020 unconstitutional has made evident what had already been sensed for some time: the extreme politicisation, and also division, of a court which, instead of being a generator of consensus and legal security, has become another stage in the struggle between conservative and progressive Spain. The fracture is growing in a court in which four members' mandates have expired and which the right wing People's Party refuses to renew due to its current conservative majority. The same is true of other bodies such as the Court of Auditors or the General Council of the Judiciary.

As already happened in the case of Jordi Turull and Josep Rull, the content of the two dissenting votes of the majority of the TC that has endorsed the sentence of the Supreme Court for sedition against Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart becomes the basis on which to build the appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). It is fair to say, moreover, that the appeal of Sànchez and Cuixart is the most likely to succeed, since they were social leaders at the time of the events (and Cuixart still is), without any political responsibility. Juan Antonio Xiol and María Luisa Balaguer go beyond pointing out that the sentences are "disproportionate" and warn: "They threaten to impoverish our democracy, to align us with societies disciplined by the abuse of the penal system in the repression of conduct that takes place in the material sphere of fundamental rights and to distance us from the need for a progressive interpretation and application of the rights that make possible the normal participation of citizens in full democracies." In other words, the sentence aligns Spain with authoritarian regimes (you name the countries, but it could be from Hungary to Russia, passing through Turkey), and distances it from the most advanced democracies within the European Union.

The Constitutional Court rejected the first appeal for protection from one of the convicted in the sentence on the Independence bid, in this case Jordi Turull. However, it did so with two dissenting opinions that have been made public this Wednesday and which contain an important legal ammunition to support an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The authors of the dissenting opinion are two magistrates, the Catalan Juan Antonio Xiol and the Andalusian María Luisa Balaguer, of progressive tendency and who defend that their position in favour of some of the defence's arguments is more in tune with the European judicial doctrine than the one defended by the majority, formed by seven magistrates.

Last week, the plenary of the Constitutional Court dismissed Jordi Turull's appeal against the Independe bid ruling, who will become the first Catalan political prisoner to appeal his conviction in Strasbourg. The decision, however, was not taken unanimously: magistrates Juan Antonio Xiol and Maria Luisa Balaguer wrote a dissenting opinion. They considered that the high court had to consider the appeal of the ex Minister because the sentence violated a series of rights, such as the principle of the legality of punishment, the right to personal freedom, ideological freedom and freedom of assembly. In the 26-page brief that was made public today, the two judges consider the sentence imposed on Turull "disproportionate", although they do not question the "criminal" relevance of the facts that were judged. However, they question whether they were constitutive of sedition, which is the crime for which he was convicted by the Supreme Court.