Judge Carmen Lamela has agreed to move ahead with the Public Prosecutor's complaint for the crime of sedition for the events that happened in Barcelona on the 20th and 21st September, specifically the gatherings and protests carried out to prevent by force the actions by the authorities and their agents exercising their functions in defence of the constitutional law. She has entrusted the Civil Guard with drafting a report on the events that followed their searches on a number of Catalan government buildings, including four ministries, and their arrests of over 10 high-ranking government officials.
In her order, the judge analyses the behaviour and events included by the prosecutors in their report and concludes that they could fit within the crime of sedition as defined in article 544 of the Penal Code.
The magistrate, quoting the Penal Code, notes that that sedition requires collective behaviour characterised as a "tumultuous" uprising aimed at preventing by force, or outside of the law, the application of the law or any authority from carrying out their functions or the fulfilment of their agreements or of administrative or legal resolutions.
Lamela notes that the legal right protected is public order understood as peace and tranquillity in protests outside of civil coexistence. It also protects the principle of authority understood as that which the public gives to institutions for the adequate exercising of their functions which it carries out in service of a democratic society. These functions, Lamela adds, would be in doubt if prevented by force.
The judge believes that the crime of sedition, as is alleged to have occurred in the cited events, falls within the remit of the National Audience in as much as, as well as attacking the legal rights protected by them, "it could be at the same time an offence against the form of government". In agreement with the narrative of the events from the prosecutor, the ultimate aim of the protests was, according to Lamela, to disrupt the organisation of the state, as such it was also an attack against the current form of the Spanish government as referred to by the law on legal power which regulates the competences of the National Audience.
The judge specifies that not all general crimes of sedition fall within the remit of the National audience, rather that in this specific case, the crime of sedition could also attack the form of the government in trying to illegally change the territorial organisation of the state and declare the independence of part of the national territory, which it also determines to be a responsibility of the Audience.