Four Catalan separatist leaders to remain in jail during election
A SPANISH judge has ordered that four prominent members of the Catalan independence movement should remain in custody, including the vice-president of the ousted regional government.
Oriol Junqueras will now campaign in a polarised regional election from a jail near Madrid.
Junqueras is a member of the left-republican ERC party which was part of the former Catalan ruling coalition with Catalan expresident Carles Puigdemont’s conservative party.
The judge set €100,000 bail for the six other Catalan politicians who had been jailed in early November, and ordered their passports to be confiscated.
The six were expected to leave jails near Madrid last night.
Mr Puigdemont and four of his separatist allies who fled to Belgium heard that they will be judged on whether they can be extradited back to Spain on December 14, exactly one week before the election.
The group is refusing to return to Spain to face rebellion, sedition and embezzlement charges that can be punished with decades in prison under the country’s criminal laws.
Mr Puigdemont’s defence lawyer, Paul Bekaert, insisted that the Spanish charges were not punishable in Belgium and thus there were no grounds for extradition.
“We also highlighted the danger for the impediment of their human rights in Spain,” he said.
Whatever decision is made on December 14, two appeals will be possible and a final ruling could well come only after the December 21 election called by Spain’s central authorities, in which Mr Puigdemont is leading his proindependence party’s campaign.
Mariano Rajoy’s conservative Spanish government disbanded Mr Puigdemont’s Cabinet when it took control of Catalonia shortly after it passed a declaration of independence in late October.
The early election is an attempt to find a democratic way out of Spain’s worst political crisis in decades.
But the vote is shaping up as a plebiscite between those for and against independence, with polls predicting a close race. A government-run poll has indicated that pro-independence parties would lose their slim majority in the Catalan regional parliament.