Neither Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez nor any of the four ministers of his cabinet summoned by the Parliament of Catalonia in its investigation of the use of Pegasus software to spy on pro-independence politicians will appear before the committee created by the Catalan chamber with this objective. The excuse given by the Spanish executive is that they are only accountable to the Congress of Deputies and the Senate, the two Spanish legislative chambers in which parliamentary groups can periodically ask them questions. It is clear that this is an evasion and a masquerade: you block any commission of inquiry in the Spanish Cortes, where you already have the PP and Vox always ready to help, and then the Catalan Parliament is told that it is a chamber with restricted powers and the matter is outside its competence.
And thus the matter is declared closed. When both ERC and Junts proposed the summoning to the committee of Pedro Sánchez, Nadia Calviño, Yolanda Díaz, Margarita Robles and Fernando Grande-Marlaska, it was already foreseeable that such obstruction would happen. But it was necessary to request their presence in order to record the refusal. We will now see what happens to other summonses made to members of the judiciary, ministers in previous governments and a whole host of Spanish personalities who could shed some light on the Catalangate espionage. But light is surely the element that there is least will to introduce into proceedings among those have been part of Spanish governments of the PSOE and, before that, of the People's Party under the leadership of Mariano Rajoy, who also, indeed, has been cited.
This Spanish attitude is even more surprising at a time when the European Commission has just recalled that, as pointed out by the European Court of Justice, a "mere reference" to national security by a member state is not sufficient to exclude the application of European Union law. That is to say, the guarantees listed in the European Convention on Human Rights cannot be trampled upon simply by waving the flag of a vague national security and taking advantage of this situation to practice illegal espionage.
The EC is closely following the inquiry committee of the European Parliament whose work Spain has tried to undermine, denying it documentation and making it difficult for it to carry out its investigative work. All roads lead to the same place in the case of espionage against the Catalan separatists: deny the facts, hide information, discredit the investigations and protect the people who may be involved in the espionage that has been practiced. They are the four corners that prop up what is hidden under the carpet of corruption in the largest espionage case which has ever come to light in Europe.