Belgian court rejects extradition call

BRUSSELS — A Belgian court on Friday rejected Spain’s demand to have a former high-ranking politician from the region of Catalonia extradited, in yet another setback for the country’s efforts to try several officials in exile over their alleged roles in an independence referendum that Madrid branded as illegal.

The Brussels prosecutor’s office said the court had decided not to enforce a European arrest warrant for former Catalan Culture Minister Lluis Puig on the grounds that “the Spanish authorities who issued the warrant are not competent to do so.”

Puig has been living in exile in Belgium since he, former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont and a number of their associates fled to Belgium in October 2017, fearing arrest over their alleged roles in the secessionist push and the holding of an independence referendum that the Spanish government had banned.

The vote sparked a police crackdown and led to one of Spain’s biggest political crises in decades as mass protests roiled the relatively wealthy northeast region of 7.5 million people. Polls and recent elections show that Catalans are roughly equally split by the secession question. Spaniards as a whole are strongly against it.

Puig’s lawyers had argued that Spain’s Supreme Court does not have the jurisdiction to judge him and that only a Catalan court is competent to do so, and they said the Belgian court agreed with them.