The High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) will not apply, for the moment, the amnesty to those considered architects of the procés, Josep Maria Jové and Lluís Salvadó, both leaders of ERC. The Civil and Criminal Chamber considers that the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) of last July 16, favorable to granting amnesty, does not answer all the questions it raised regarding the case of Jové and Salvadó, both accused of embezzlement of public funds.
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In an order issued on September 3, the Chamber decides not to withdraw the preliminary questions it raised to the Luxembourg court, considering that the July 16 ruling “does not address all the reservations” raised by the court itself. The Chamber, composed of judges Jesús María Barrientos, Fernando Lacaba, and Carlos Ramos, holds that the case of Jové and Salvadó presents a “nature” different from the matters analyzed in that ruling.
The TSJC argues that the CJEU ruling of July 16 does not resolve all its questions
For this reason, it decides to maintain “in the same terms” the preliminary questions raised before the CJEU on July 30, 2024. “Even admitting that the Grand Chamber rulings contain a battery of considerations that, without effort, can be transposed and provide answers to some of the premises that fueled the normative adequacy reservations we expressed in our order of July 30, 2024, the nature of the proceedings from which the national courts raised the preliminary questions already resolved by the CJEU differs radically, for these purposes, from the nature of the procedure still pending trial before us,” the judges argue.
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For its part, the Prosecutor’s Office submitted a document warning that the CJEU ruling did not resolve identically the questions raised by the Chamber and left the decision on “the withdrawal or maintenance of the preliminary questions” to the court’s discretion. The State Attorney’s Office was in favor of withdrawing the questions, while the popular accusation, exercised by Vox, demanded to maintain them.
In its July 16 ruling, the CJEU endorsed the amnesty law and issued two resolutions responding to the preliminary questions raised by the National Court and the Court of Auditors. In the first, it concluded that the amnesty was compatible with European law regarding the so-called Judas operation, in which several pro-independence activists from the Committees for the Defense of the Republic (CDR) were accused of terrorism. In the second, it determined that amnestying the accounting responsibility arising from the expenses of the Catalan independence process does not pose a risk to the finances of the European Union, in relation to the possible existence of an embezzlement crime linked to the October 1 referendum.
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