The Prosecutor's Office appeals Alves' acquittal for review by the Supreme Court.

The Prosecutor's Office has formally announced its intention to appeal the ruling of the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) last Friday acquitted footballer Dani Alves by overturning his conviction for sexually assaulting a girl at the Sutton nightclub.

In this process of announcing the appeal, the Prosecutor's Office has only notified the TSJC that it will file an appeal for the Supreme Court to review its ruling, and in the coming days it will submit the brief in which it will develop its arguments. For now, the Prosecutor's Office has only advanced the reasons on which it will base the appeal, but without specifying them. Broadly speaking, the appeal will be based on the only legal loopholes that allow it to appeal the ruling, since the Supreme Court cannot review the evidence in a criminal case, including witness statements or documentation. Therefore, the Prosecutor's Office will argue that the TSJC ruling overturning Alves's conviction violates constitutional precepts and principles of the Penal Code.

However, it must be kept in mind that the Supreme Court's scope to review Alves's sentence, like any other, is limited. According to the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court cannot impose a sentence on a lower court acquittal. However, if the Supreme Court considers that the TSJC's acquittal is based on erroneous arguments, it can order a new sentence to be issued by a different court, according to legal sources cited by Efe.

This is the second time the Prosecutor's Office has revisited the case.

The Prosecutor's Office had already appealed the first ruling in this case, which sentenced Alves to four and a half years in prison, for requesting that the High Court of Justice (TSJC) increase the sentence to nine years. However, the Catalan court rejected both the Prosecutor's Office's request and that of the private prosecution (which sought 12 years in prison) and instead upheld the defense's appeal in a ruling that resulted in the footballer's acquittal.

Although it has not yet outlined its arguments, on the one hand, the Public Prosecutor's Office will invoke the article in the Criminal Procedure Code, which stipulates that one of the grounds for an appeal is a "violation of a constitutional precept." And, on the other hand, the Prosecutor's Office will also base its arguments on another section of the same law, which in this case stipulates that an appeal may be filed when, given the facts declared proven in the judgment being appealed, "a substantive criminal provision or another legal norm of the same nature that must be violated has been violated."