The Constitutional Court has ended the amparo appeals filed by the former Catalan vice president Oriol Junqueras and the former ministers Jordi Turull and Raül Romeva against the initial refusal by the Supreme Court to apply amnesty to them for embezzlement in the context of the 'procés', after the Supreme Court itself has finally applied the measure of clemency to them.
According to a press release from the guarantor body, the Plenary has unanimously agreed in two judgments to declare the subsequent loss of purpose of the amparo appeals brought by Turull, Junqueras and Romeva against the orders of the high court that initially rejected the amnesty for the crime of embezzlement of public funds.
In its rulings, it is recalled that, after the Constitutional Court ruling that upheld the amparo appeal of the former minister Dolors Bassa against those same decisions of the Supreme Court, the Criminal Chamber “agreed to extend the effects” of that ruling “to the rest of the convicted parties affected by the same judgment, declaring their criminal liability extinguished with a definitive filing of the judgment.”
For this reason, the Plenary of the Constitutional Court concludes that, with that order, “the legitimate interest alleged in both amparo appeals has been exhausted, and therefore their extinction is appropriate due to the subsequent loss of purpose.”
The court recalls that Turull argued in his amparo appeal that “the challenged judicial decisions had verified an expansive and contrary-to-the-defendant interpretation of the exception provided for in the Amnesty Law of having acted with the purpose of obtaining a personal benefit of a patrimonial nature, which would have infringed his rights to legality in criminal matters.”
He also argued that “the exception concerning the effect on the financial interests of the European Union had been applied due to the existence of a risk of territorial secession of Catalonia that the convicting sentence itself considered was not real, which would have infringed his rights to effective judicial protection and to a process with all guarantees.”
As for Junqueras and Romeva, they indicated that "the challenged judicial decisions made an unreasonable interpretation of the same exceptions to the application" of the amnesty, "emptying the content of the rule and rendering it inoperative, appreciating a purpose of enrichment and an effect on the financial interests of the European Union that were not the subject of adversarial debate nor were they reflected in the judgment, and therefore their fundamental rights to effective judicial protection, the principle of criminal legality, the right to a process with all guarantees and the right to political participation would have been violated".