The secretary general of Junts, Jordi Turull, asked the Constitutional Court to suspend, as a precautionary measure, his sentence of ineligibility while he studies his appeal for protection against the refusal of amnesty by the Supreme Court. The leader is demanding an urgent response from the Guarantees Court to allow him to return to public office without having to wait for the final decision in the case.
Turull’s protection appeal is the first to reach the Constitutional Court in an attempt to revoke the Supreme Court’s refusal to grant amnesty to the leaders of the process. In the case of Turull and the former councilors already convicted and pardoned, the sentence that the Supreme Court refused to grant amnesty was a forfeiture, which was still in effect since his pardon only affected his prison sentence. Turull is still unable to hold public office until July 2030.
According to lawyer Jordi Pina in his writings, the sentence of interdiction which weighs on Turull leads the secretary general of Junts to see “seriously limited the exercise of his political rights” by not being able to attend the elections or access functions public although it is one of them. the leaders of a party enjoying broad social support in Catalonia.
The preventive suspension of his disqualification, deepens Turull’s defense, allows him to avoid “an unnecessary and illegitimate sacrifice” of his rights. “In the unlikely event that this appeal is rejected, nothing will prevent the pending part of the deprivation of rights sentence from continuing to be served subsequently until its complete extinction,” explains Pina’s writing, which excludes to allow Turull to return to office as a precautionary measure, public office causes “no serious disruption to any constitutionally protected interest.”
On the merits of the case, the defense of the leader of the Junts requests that the Constitutional Court “restore the rights injured” by the refusal of the Supreme Court to grant him amnesty and that the guarantee court orders Chamber II of the High Court, presided over by Manuel Marchena, to declare that all of Turull’s criminal liability had been extinguished under the amnesty law.
The Constitutional Court has received dozens of writings and appeals regarding amnesty, making this issue one of the most controversial in its history. The court must respond to the harsh allegations made by the Supreme Court regarding the first article of the amnesty law approved a few months ago by Congress; the question of unconstitutionality in relation to the norm which was also raised by the Catalan TSJ; the appeals filed by the PP and several autonomous communities and the requests for protection of the persons concerned to which the courts have not applied the rule.
