The talk of the town across Spanish media for the past week has been the pardoning of the Catalan political prisoners jailed following the unofficial referendum on independence in October 2017. Despite heavy opposition from Spain’s Supreme Court and the conservative opposition party, the Partido Popular (PP), the socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, confirmed the pardons at Barcelona’s Liceu Theatre, striving to promote concord rather than revenge.[...]
Opposition to the pardons has come from two very different standpoints. The PP, the far-right Vox and the Spanish-nationalist Ciudadanos—as well as the Spanish Supreme Court— claim that the political prisoners should not have been pardoned: their actions were unconstitutional, they included ‘sedition’ and misuse of public funds, and the prisoners showed no signs of remorse.[....]
The exiled Junts leader and 130th president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, criticised the Spanish state for releasing the prisoners over three years late and said no one should be ‘sold’ that the pardon would solve the political problem. The party vice-president, Elsa Artadi, also affirmed this would not be a ‘turning point’ in the Catalan conflict, claiming the Spanish government was seeking to mask its own violations of rights against the independence movement. [...]
On Monday of last week, a resolution by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe urged that the prisoners be released and that Spain ‘consider dropping extradition proceedings against Catalan politicians living abroad’. An aggressive response followed from the judiciary in Spain, leading some to ask: are the pardons a step towards peace, or a red herring in the face of increasing international condemnation of the Spanish judiciary?
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