The slap from the Belgian justice system to their Spanish counterpart is so great that, in any serious country, the attorney general would have already resigned after the decision taken on Sunday evening in Brussels to immediately release Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and his four ministers. But Spain is different and the Justice minister and José Manuel Maza, the attorney general, can remain in their roles despite having been admonished by the Congress of Deputies. The governors and the parties that support them have more than enough bums on seats to ward off a hit from the heart of Europe to the outraged carried out by the Spanish state towards the Catalan demands.
It's certainly not the first time this has happened and that a European Arrest Warrant has been denied in the first instance by the justice system of an EU country. But we're not facing a normal legal case, rather something that the Spanish government has conveniently fed to present it as a coup d'état. In this way, with this false narrative, vice-president Oriol Junqueras and another seven ministers have ended up in two prisons in the community of Madrid. In this way, with these lies, Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart are in Soto del Real prison. This narrative, for the moment, has been shredded by the Belgian justice system. And they have slit open the debate over the separation of powers in Spain. The Madrid papers which, in a new exercise in self-censorship, chose on Monday to hide the news of the release of Puigdemont and the ministers in many of their editions, know this perfectly well. Their front pages seemed more political than informative.
Two simultaneous debates are now opening: the deeper analysis by Belgian justice over whether there are conditions for a future extradition, which will drag out for months; and the political and diplomatic confrontation between the Belgian and Spanish governments. In the first case, the comparison with the actions of Spain's National Audience court will be daily. The reasonable idea would be for the National Audience to immediately adopt a similar decision and put an end to the preventive detention. The attorney general and judge Lamela are obliged to do so.
In the political sphere, the PP (Popular Party) have used their MEP Esteban González Pons to leap onto the playing field and give the greatest beating possible to the Belgian politicians. It is, doubtlessly, a bad path of more than debatable diplomacy. The reality is that the crisis between the two governments will not end up limited to a debate between two countries. It's a question of time. Time the independence movement needs to revalidate its majority in the Catalan Parliament and to put its demands back on the table.