Ex-catalan minister is bailed in new court battle
Spain’s attempt to extradite Catalan independence campaigner for sedition raises profound questions
Clara Ponsati was granted bail yesterday at Edinburgh Sheriff Court after authorities in Spain began a fresh bid to have the former Catalan minister extradited from Scotland.
The St Andrews University academic, 62, is wanted by federal prosecutors in Madrid in relation to her involvement in the hugely controversial Catalan independence referendum in 2017 - an event organised by the devolved administration in the north-eastern Spanish province for which she served as education minister.
The economics lecturer, who denies any wrongdoing, appeared in court after earlier handing herself in at St Leonard’s Police Station in the south of the capital. She was allowed to keep her passport and is due back in court on
12 December. Prof Ponsati faces a single charge of sedition. Speaking outside St Leonard’s yesterday morning, her lawyer Aamer Anwar said: “We believe this is an abuse of the extradition process, we believe this is an abuse of the European Arrest Warrant.
“The crime of sedition is a 16th century offence that was created by kings and queens to stop backlash from ordinary people that wanted their rights. Luckily in Scotland, sedition was abolished a long time ago.
“We will be fighting this on the basis of Clara’s human rights being abused if she is returned back to Spain.”
Prof Ponsati served in the Catalan administration when it organised a 2017 referendum on whether the province should break from Spain – despite stern warnings from the Spanish federal authorities that it violated the country’s written constitution.
The vote was widely boycotted by Catalan unionists and delivered a landslide result for pro-independence supporters – a result declared as illegal by the central government in Madrid and led to the suspension of the devolved government.
Nine of 12 political leaders involved in the 2017 referendum were last month given stiff prison sentences by Spain’s supreme court.
The academic’s full extradition hearing had been due to begin in Edinburgh last summer, with Scottish prosecutors prepared to use the centuriesold law of treason to try to send her back to Spain But a Spanish Supreme Court judge dropped the extradition request.
The decision by Spanish judges to drop the case came after a German court ruled in 2018 that former Catalan regional president Carles Puigdemont could not be sent back to Spain for rebellion, only to face charges of embezzlement connected to alleged misuse of public funds for a referendum on secession.
Ahead of the court hearing yesterday, her legal team said that there could be no guarantee of a right to a fair trial in Spain, where most memfor bers of the Catalan government are already in prison or in exile, and insisted she would instead be “subjected to a show trial where the only possible verdict could be one of guilty”.
“It is not a crime to vote for independence and the extradition will be opposed robustly,” Mr Anwar said.
“It is Clara’s intention to put on trial the Spanish justice system as well to consider citing those politicians who have interfered with due process. Clara is once again taking on the might of the Spanish state and remains resolute and determined to fight and believes Spain will never be able to crush the spirit of the Catalan people.”
In a statement issued following his client’s appearance at the Sheriff Court yesterday, Mr Anwar continued: “If there is anyone who should be put on trial then it is the Spanish state unleashing an orgy of violence on the Catalan people, for its assaults on the right to vote, and on the right to selfdetermination.
“The Spanish authorities have repeatedly abused the European Arrest Warrant.
“We are instructed by Clara to robustly defend her from what she describes as ‘judicially motivated revenge’.”
“The crime of sedition is a 16th century offence that was created by kings to stop backlash”
AAMER ANWAR
Thomas Paine, author of the Rights of Man, lived to the age of 72, an impressive achievement, given the efforts of two world leaders of his time, William Pitt and the infamous Maximilien Robespierre, to secure his execution. Even George Washington, despite Paine’s role in the American Revolution, “carefully abstained from measures designed to save his life” as the first US president came to hate him “because he was a democrat”, according to philosopher Bertrand Russell.
In Britain, Paine was convicted in absentia of “seditious libel”, an offence abolished in Scotland, England and Wales in 2010, long after it fell out of use. Free speech campaigner Lisa Appignanesi suggested Paine would have been pleased that MPS had finally agreed to take a historic step forward for “our right to speak and think freely” while then justice minister Claire Ward described sedition as an “arcane offence... from a bygone era when freedom of expression wasn’t seen as the right it is today”.
So the attempt by Spain to extradite ex-catalan government minister Clara Ponsati, currently a professor at St Andrews University, for sedition in relation to her role in the Catalan independence movement raises some profound questions. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of that particular case, we should be glad to live in a country where sedition, defined by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as “organising or encouraging opposition to government in a manner that falls short of the more dangerous offences constituting treason”, is no longer an offence and that those who campaign against the state are only prosecuted if they commit criminal acts like violence or intimidation.
The case against sedition was eloquently made by the writer Will Self in 2010: “In amongst the fast-growing leylandii of political correctness... there stands that hoary old oak, seditious libel. This has always been a shape-shifting law, capable of being employed as a cudgel against satirists, incendiarists, malcontents and revolutionaries alike. A mature democracy, with a tradition of open government and freedom of speech, has no need of such ancient Star Chamber inquisitions.”
However, such is the fundamentally hollow message of identity politics pushed by the right-wing populists of the modern world that they may seek to reintroduce such undemocratic laws. Sedition dates back to the 16th century and it is there where it belongs.