The European Commission has confirmed that it has received the complaint filed yesterday by the former president of the Generalitat, Carles Puigdemont, against the Kingdom of Spain for not applying the Amnesty Law after last week’s CJEU ruling. And nothing more, because Brussels completely avoids making a statement. Among other things, because Gonzalo Boye has not knocked on the right door, although the lawyer is probably fully aware of this and has already achieved what he was looking for: to generate noise.
“We can confirm that we have received the letter,” a Commission spokesperson said this afternoon, recalling that “when complaints are submitted, they are processed in accordance with the Commission’s usual procedure: they are examined, registered, and evaluated before a decision is adopted.” This is a standard response, to then add: “We have no further comments to make at this stage.”
And regarding the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union itself, the Commission has again indicated that, obviously, it “is aware of the latest ruling of the Court of Justice on this matter, issued on July 16.” And perhaps most importantly, that “it is up to the referring courts to apply the judgments of the Court of Justice.”
In the complaint filed yesterday by Puigdemont along with former ministers Toni Comín and Lluís Puig, he asserted that the decision of the Spanish Court of Auditors to open a 10-day period for allegations in the case of the alleged diversion of funds for the illegal referendum of 1-O in 2017 contravenes the CJEU decision.
In Boye’s opinion, this decision implies the suspension of the ruling, and the lawyer demanded that the Commission act “given the nature of the breach and its impact on precautionary measures that burden the complainants with more than 9.5 million euros.” “Introducing it after the ruling, without any factual support, is not an exercise of the national judge’s exclusive competence to ascertain and assess the facts: it is an evasion of the declared interpretation,” he adds.
And to this, the lawyer for the former fugitive president added that Article 4 of the Treaty on European Union on sincere cooperation is being violated. “The deliberate non-compliance with a judgment of the Court of Justice by a court of a Member State, accompanied by its public misrepresentation through an official press release, affects the value of the rule of law on which the Union is founded. All this without prejudice to the State’s patrimonial liability towards individuals for violations of Union law attributable to its courts,” the complaint insisted.
But the Commission has done none of that, and if one looks at Brussels’ usual procedures, what is observed is that the Community Executive can take up to a year to make a decision on this type of complaint. That is, it is not only very unlikely that the EU will do anything given that this complaint, in reality, does not concern it, but also the deadline is much longer than the 10 days given by the Spanish Court of Auditors. In short, independence movement fireworks like those seen yesterday in Brussels’ Cinquantenaire Park on the occasion of the Belgian national holiday.
