Vic City Council has been sentenced for requiring an excessively high level of Catalan to fill a civil servant position in the brigade, according to the 15th Administrative Court of Barcelona. The city council of the Osona province held a public competition for the position of cemetery and maintenance worker, for which it required a B2 level of Catalan, an intermediate level. Following a complaint from Catalan Civic Coexistence, the court ruled that "the indiscriminate elevation of the requirement to level B2 is not connected with the functions" of the job and "creates an access barrier with an exclusionary effect for those who do not demonstrate that level." Therefore, it declares the conditions void and specifically requests that an A2 level of Catalan, the basic level, be required.

We said yesterday that the sentencing of Bolsonaro, the far-right leader and former Brazilian president, to 27 years in prison for an attempted coup d'état is an important international benchmark for the judicialization of politics, an anomaly not unique to Spain and a favorite weapon of populism and the far right when it comes to destabilizing the country. As we know here, putting the justice system at the service of political interests subverts the democratic principle of the separation of powers. But it's a transgression that some people happily commit if they can profit from it. When the trick backfires, it seems like a "judicial dictatorship," which is what Bolsonaro and his supporters are now denouncing.

Script twist, at least temporarily, in the case against the previous Parliamentary Bureau for having allowed a debate and a vote on resolutions in favour of the independence referendum and against the monarchy. Catalonia's High Court has accepted the recusal of the court's president, Jesús María Barrientos, which was demanded by former deputy Speaker Josep Costa. This means that the court will remove Barrientos from the case and, automatically, will postpone the trial –initially scheduled for July 12, 13 and 15– so that Barrientos can be replaced by another magistrate. The High Court admits the recusal because it accepts that Barrientos's leaving a conference in which the situation of "political prisoners" was denounced was not neutral, "but a public and forceful show of disagreement with the person". It was on February 23, 2018 at the Col·legi d'Advocats and giving the conference was then Speaker Roger Torrent, who has been indicted in this case.

Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly has been very close to approving a new resolution criticising Spain for "numerous criminal cases" over the organisation of the October 1, 2017 Catalan Independence Referendum and for the European arrest warrants against exiles. The text compared the Spanish state to Turkey and aspired to answer the question: "Should politicians be tried for statements made in the exercise of their mandate?" And the answer posed by rapporteur Boriss Cilevics, a Latvian Socialist MP, consisted of congratulating the Spanish government for the pardons, criticising it for the fact that they can now be reversed and recommending, once again, a reform of the crimes of sedition and rebellion. But the Spanish government will never receive a document that will force it to do all these things because PSOE and PP have joined forces to prevent its approval. By seducing a few more representatives at the last minute, PP and PSOE have managed to have any reference to Spain removed, and the country's name no longer appears next to Turkey's.

Catalonia's High Court will try former Speaker and current minister for Enterprise and Employment Roger Torrent, alongside the other pro-independence members of the previous Parliamentary Bureau, for having allowed the processing of resolutions on the monarchy and self-determination in autumn 2019. In a resolution issued this Wednesday, the investigating magistrate Maria Eugènia Alegret considers that Torrent, Josep Costa, Eusebi Campdepadrós and Ariadna Delgado could have committed a crime of serious disobedience and gives them a period of ten days to submit their defence briefs.

Pau Juvillà was sentenced by the Catalonia's High Court to a six-month disqualification and a €1,080 fine for not removing a yellow ribbon from his office at Lleida city council, of which he was alderman during the municipal elections of 2019. Thereafter, the Central Electoral Board urged Parliament to enforce the ban of the now MP, setting this Friday as a deadline for effective compliance, without waiting for the Supreme Court to resolve the precautionary measures that both Parliament and Juvillà himself have requested. Stripping the CUP MP of his seat is an unacceptable and disproportionate external interference by an administrative body such as the Electoral Board. Moreover, according to Parliament's procedure rules, the case in question does not meet any of the conditions for Juvillà to lose his seat or to be suspended. Thus, the bottom line is obvious: Juvillà would have to continue as MP.

The third chamber of the Supreme Court has dismissed the appeals filed against the pardons of Catalan political prisoners with an argument that allows it to avoid having to enter into the merits of the case. What it has determined is that the parties (PP, Vox and Cs), entities and individuals who filed the appeals are not legitimised to do so. Although there is still the possibility of appealing the decision, everything points to the end of the nightmare of the prison sentences that the second chamber of the same court imposed on nine political and social leaders of the independence movement.

Catalonia's High Court has suspended CUP MP Pau Juvillà for 6 months and handed him a €1,080 fine for disobedience. Juvillà, currently the third secretary of the Catalan Parliamentary Bureau, represented CUP as a local councillor in Lleida. As such, he refused to take down yellow ribbons (used to protest against political prisoners) from the party's office in the Town Council in the spring of 2019 despite receiving an order from the electoral board.