Salvador Illa has shown during his first 100 days of presidency that street crime is one of the areas of greatest interest. This Friday, after his meeting with President Pedro Sánchez in La Moncloa, the President of the Generalitat announced the commitment of the central government to work on a new plan against multiple recidivism which will include more resources for the Catalan courts.
“We suffer from a congestion of the courts which prevents us from acting against multiple criminal recidivism,” said Illa. To this end, he announced, from December they will launch a joint “shock plan” between the Ministry of Justice and the counterpart department of the Generalitat, which will involve an injection of resources.
The aim of both governments is to speed up trials in order to significantly reduce the number of cases pending before the courts. The plan is not more detailed at the moment, although Illa assured that concrete measures would be announced from December.
In the same spirit, Sánchez and Illa agreed to reconvene the four bilateral commissions provided for in the Statute. Illa assured that among the subjects he wanted to energize in these joint bodies, there is the problem of housing, as well as certain details linked to the financing of public services, on which the two administrations are working.
“When Catalonia improves, Spain improves,” assured Illa, who considered that there are “many areas of autonomy that can be deployed” within the framework of the Catalan Statute.
As Illa explains, the four commissions will be held in the first quarter of 2025, after some of them were not convened in the last two years. “There is enough margin for the departments to fill the agendas,” explained the president.
At the same meeting, the heads of the Government and the Generalitat discussed investments in the technological field and, more specifically, in the chip or semiconductor industry. It is a “strategic area for Europe”, underlined Illa, and which “Catalonia and Spain want to lead”.
The president mentioned Innofab, a chip pre-production factory that plans to open its doors in 2026 in Cerdanyola del Vallès and which Illa assured will continue to benefit from the public impetus it needs, after having was a gamble of the previous Pere government. Aragonese.
The strategy with Innofab is to improve the entire existing network in Catalonia in terms of semiconductors, from design and research to the manufacturing of prototypes. Although the head of government did not give precise figures on direct public investments, he assured that the project would mobilize 392 million euros.
“Catalonia is one of the main drivers of Spain’s technological commitment. We add talent, we have the most advanced research centers, infrastructures such as the ALBA Synchrotron and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputacion (BSC-CNS), as well as leading companies and universities in this domain,” Illa emphasized. .
