The opinion of the lieutenant prosecutor of the Supreme coincides with that of the prosecutor of the same room and rejects the thesis of the anti-terrorist prosecutor of the National Court
After several weeks of internal conflict in the Prosecutor’s Office of the Supreme Court, the judgment of the prosecutor of the criminal division of the same court, Álvaro Redondo, has finally prevailed. The lieutenant prosecutor of the Supreme Court, María Ángeles Sánchez Conde, has drawn up an opinion in which she rules out that the actions promoted by Democratic Tsunami can be used to investigate Puigdemont for terrorism and considers that, at most, they can only be a crime of serious public disorder . Likewise, he has transferred his report to the board of prosecutors and the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, after an unprecedented crisis in the Spanish public ministry in this case due to the post-sentence mobilizations of the Process. The opinion requests that the case be returned to the National Court.
In the opinion, number two of the prosecutor’s case also coincides with the arguments presented by the prosecutor of the same criminal court of the Supreme Court, Álvaro Redondo, who, by turn of distribution, was in charge of drafting a first document, which the harder sector of the Board of Fiscals rejected two weeks ago. The situation caused her to be the lieutenant prosecutor of the Supreme Court, the highest ranking in the Spanish prosecutor’s office below the attorney general, who received the task of drafting the final opinion with the opinion of the public ministry.
The final decision will be made by the criminal division of the Supreme Court, presided over by Marchena
Now the document will be sent to the criminal room of the Supreme Court, which is chaired by Manuel Marchena, but the position of the prosecution is not binding. The magistrates are the ones who will really have to decide if they accept the case that the head of the central inquiry court number 6 of the National Court, Manuel García Castellón, wants to give them. The investigating judge raised the summary to the Supreme Court because he accused the president-in-exile, Carles Puigdemont, who is understood to be a current member of the European Parliament, for possible crimes of terrorism.
An internal battle that independence has unleashed
The crisis at the top of the tax ministry has been unleashed in recent weeks due to the Tsunami and in full discussion of the amnesty law. In fact, parallel to the political negotiation of the amnesty, the judge opted for the fast track by trying to apply a crime – terrorism – that has no place in the amnesty law. The decision angered the prosecution of the National Court, which has strongly opposed the classification of the facts investigated in the case as terrorism. The judge, aware that the public ministry would face him, allowed the entry of two prosecutors in the shadow in the form of the accusation of policemen injured during the protests at El Prat airport and during the riots of October 2019 in Barcelona.
Finally, the judge transferred the case to the Supreme Court, through a reasoned statement in which he asked that he take charge of the case with the imputation request of the aborator Carles Puigdemont – as well as a dozen other people such as the general secretary of ERC, Marta Rovira, or the secretary of the Parliament desk, Ruben Wagensberg. The Supreme Court referred the judge’s interlocutory order to the public ministry so that it could present its opinion. In turn, prosecutor Redondo studied the matter and sent a first draft to one of the two heads of the board of prosecutors of the Supreme Court, Fidel Cadena, and he would have sent it to other prosecutors critics of García Ortiz. In this first draft, the prosecutor concluded that there were arguments to investigate the case as terrorism.
War of drafts
The tension quickened. After sending the draft, Redondo, who only knew of the case’s explanatory statement, García Castellón’s text, discovered more details of the case and came to another conclusion: there was no terrorism and, at most , it could be interpreted that serious public disorder had occurred. A position that he commented to his colleagues in the meeting held on February 2, although it was not on the agenda. However, Redondo had met minutes earlier with the Attorney General, a meeting where he would have informed him of his decision.
The hard sector took out the hatchet and accused Álvaro García Ortiz of “pressuring” prosecutor Redondo. Just the next day, media outlets aligned with the hard-line pro-independence prosecutors leaked the first draft. Prosecutor Álvaro Redondo was even forced to issue a press release explaining how the story had gone. The Attorney General, for his part, warned that some prosecutors had been “disloyal” and even used the concept of “treason”. It was then that the opinion was entrusted to the deputy prosecutor of the Supreme Court, in fact, the first on the fiscal ladder after an institutional position such as that of the State Attorney General.
