The Supreme Court has upheld the filing of the Democratic Tsunami case against Carles Puigdemont, a case in which the former Catalan president was being investigated for terrorism. In an order, Judge Susana Polo rejects the appeals of Vox and other popular accusations and confirms that the error of Judge Manuel García Castellón in irregularly extending the investigation results in the cancellation and archiving of the file: “No investigation has been carried out” on the participation of the people investigated in the events, “recalls the High Court.
The Democratic Tsunami case began in the National Court and has investigated for years the organization of the massive demonstrations that took place in Catalonia to protest the judgment of the trial that convicted the pro-independence leaders for sedition, embezzlement and disobedience. A case that turned against Carles Puigdemont at the end of 2023, while the PSOE and Junts were negotiating the details of the amnesty law. The magistrate announced that Marta Rovira and Carles Puigdemont, among others, were part of the list of people prosecuted for crimes of terrorism.
The case was brought before the Supreme Court when García Castellón formally requested that he be charged with a crime that could leave him outside the amnesty. Judge Susana Polo even opened a trial against him but signed the file when the defendant’s defense denounced an irregularity in the investigation of the recently retired judge of the National Court, who annulled most of the proceedings carried out: he had lengthened the case illegally.
Polo filed a complaint for terrorism against Puigdemont and Rubén Wagensberg, a Catalan deputy of the ERC, and upheld his decision after rejecting the appeals of Vox, Dignidad y Justicia and the Catalan Civil Society. In her order, the magistrate reiterates that García Castellón’s irregularity has resulted in the case being closed, something that the magistrate himself acknowledged after archiving the part of the procedure that he himself had kept open.
The Supreme Court recalls that the only valid procedures in this case were those carried out before the red line of July 29, 2021, and that this is not enough to support a case of terrorism against the former president and now deputy of the Junts in the Catalan Parliament. “No investigation has been carried out into the determining cause of the participation of the persons investigated in the events.” Vox and the rest of the accusations, adds Judge Polo, do not specify what evidence survived the sorting to maintain the case against Puigdemont.
