The Supreme Prosecutor's Office warns Ponsatí: "Parliamentary immunity cannot be conceived as a personal privilege"

The Supreme Court Prosecutor's Office opposes the claims of the former Catalan minister Clara Ponsatí that a new request be made to the European Parliament before she can be arrested to appear before the High Court.

In a report sent to magistrate Pablo Llarena, instructor of the process, the prosecutors of Sala Javier Zaragoza and Fidel Cadena remind Ponsatí that “the claim that a new petition be issued to the European Parliament prior to the issuance of an arrest warrant is out of place and lacks any legal support. The request is not a sine qua non condition for the issuance of personal precautionary measures, but rather for the continuation and substantiation of the procedure with respect to the taxpayer, when he has not been charged or prosecuted previously by the competent court.

In the allegations, formalized against the appeal that Ponsatí filed when Llarena released her last March, the representatives of the Public Ministry recall that “parliamentary immunity cannot be conceived as a personal privilege, that is, as a private right of certain citizens who would see themselves favored in this way with respect to the rest”.

The report, known by EL MUNDO, also underlines that “it is contradictory that the appellant invokes the applicability of article 71.2 of the Constitution to recall her immunity as a member of the European Parliament against possible arrests or precautionary measures that she may be subject to, and yet denies the competence of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court for prosecution legally established in article 71.3 of the Constitution. Both legal provisions are part of the set of privileges and immunities of the parliamentary statute applicable to national deputies and MEPs”.

legal distortion

Similarly, the prosecutors criticize the legal distortion that the MEP tries to make of immunity when “the very nature and purpose of the prerogative of immunity, which is none other than to prevent the criminal process from being used to alter the composition and functioning of a legislative chamber”.

Likewise, the members of the Public Ministry recall that the presentation of Ponsatí as a candidate for the European Parliament elections held on May 26, and her recent election as a result of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, “have already been processed and having previously fled from Spanish justice, for which reason he was fully aware of the limitations that his procedural situation entailed in the effective exercise of his political rights; from which it can be reasonably inferred that what he really wanted was to avail himself of the protective cloak of the immunity that, in his opinion, was granted by the election as a member of the European Parliament with the purpose of obtaining freedom and avoiding criminal proceedings through this channel”.

Lastly, prosecutors Zaragoza and Cadena emphasize that, contrary to what was maintained by Ponsatí's defense in his appeal, “there is no objective, verifiable and reliable data or element that demonstrates the existence of systemic or general deficiencies in the Spanish judicial system”.

The Prosecutor's Office also defends that the repeal of the crime of sedition “is not equivalent” to a decriminalization of all the events that took place in Catalonia in September and October of 2017 “nor does it entail the decriminalization of the events that led to the conviction for that crime “.

“On the contrary, the need for the retroactive application of the new law as soon as it is favorable to the accused forces us to examine the possibilities of subsuming the same facts in the current criminal types, so that only if there were no possible fit for any of the facts in the new regulations, it would be possible to speak of decriminalization”, they conclude.