Endorsement of the Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to the core aspects of the amnesty law. The Advocate General has concluded that the rule “does not oppose” European regulations on the fight against terrorism or the protection of the financial interests of the Union. These are the two central elements, related to embezzlement and terrorism, that were questioned by the Spanish courts contrary to the norm.
The lawyer of the Court of Justice of the European Union only questions two minor and already outdated aspects of the rule, such as the obligation for judges to resolve its application in two months (the rule was published in the BOE last year and this deadline has already been met) and and withdraw the precautionary measures, according to the reading he made this Thursday in the courtroom in Luxembourg.
In addition to the Supreme Court’s offensive against the law by refusing to apply the amnesty to Carles Puigdemont, Oriol Junqueras and the rest of the former ministers, four national instances sent preliminary rulings to the CJEU before deciding on the rule.
The most relevant preliminary questions were those sent to Luxembourg by the Court of Auditors and the National Court in the cases on the 1-O expenses and the CDR accused of terrorism. These courts consider that the rule puts the financial interests of the EU at risk and violates the European directive on the fight against terrorism.
The EU Advocate General is a figure in the CJEU who provides judges with legal opinions on cases after studying them in depth. The conclusions of the advocate general are not binding, but they guide the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in drafting the ruling, which has not yet been dated.
The European response to the amnesty depends, to a large extent, on making any new request from the Supreme Court to extradite the former president almost impossible. Carles Puigdemont as well as saving those from jail CDR accused of terrorism.
One of the key aspects of the future sentence will be to see the room for maneuver that Luxembourg judges They can leave it to the Spanish courts to apply the amnesty (and that will be key to verifying whether the magistrates in Spain once again ignore the law and do not apply it in the most sensitive cases for the independentists, as the Supreme Court has done with Puigdemont). For this we will have to wait for the CJEU ruling in a few months.
The hearing that the CJEU held in July on the amnesty law was marked by political assessments against the rule made by the European Commission lawyer, Carlos Urraca, who questioned the amnesty “in exchange” for the investiture. At a legal level, the Commission He stood somewhere between supporters and detractors. of the law: he endorsed it in broad strokes but rejected some of its aspects and, in others, asked leave them in the hands of the Spanish judges (an extreme that the independentists want to avoid).
For their part, the Spanish Prosecutor’s Office, the State Attorney’s Office and the defense of the independentists, as has happened in Spain, defend the legal fit of the amnesty. On the contrary, the anti-independence entity Catalan Civil Society (which prosecutes the Court of Auditors) and the Catalan Association of Victims of Terrorist Organizations (ACVOT, the accusation against the CDR) deny that community regulations protect the legal oblivion of the process.