Can a (Spanish) judge refuse to appear before another court in a foreign country (Belgium) to answer to core accusations affecting his professional actions like violation of the right to an impartial judge, fair and just legal proceedings and the right to the presumption of innocence? The answer should be no, especially when the person judging in Spain, Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena, is upholding accusations of the greatest seriousness and which European justice has already knocked down?. However, in all certainty, it will end up being yes for two reasons: firstly, the judge has already asked for protection from the General Council of the Judiciary over the summons from the Belgian court for 4th September and, secondly, because nothing can lead us to think he wants to appear.
In fact, Llarena should testify as an accused party in the civil lawsuit presented by the members of the Catalan government in exile, president Puigdemont and ministers Comín, Serret, Puig and Ponsatí. A judge judged by another justice system shouldn't be anything that special, especially because the plaintiffs are today resident in a country which isn't Spain. Llarena shouldn't be scared and nor should he take shelter in his legal immunity, a situation which everyone tends to criticise in the abstract, but which the 10,000 who find themselves protected (a record in Europe) tend to turn to always. How far we are from Europe! In Portugal and Italy only the presidents have such protection; in France, the president, the prime minister and their government, and in Germany, nobody.
It's clear that Llarena won't go to Brussels and that the protection systems will end up working for him. When the judge calls on the risk that the lawsuit implies for the integrity of Spanish jurisdiction he's not only defending himself, but by extension the whole second chamber of the Supreme Court. Llarena doesn't want to be examined by Belgian justice. And, whatever the members of the government in exile think of it all, it's normal: the last time he ended up scalped and nobody like for that to happen to them twice.
In other words, on 4th September everything suggests it won't be necessary to keep watch before the already famous stairs of the Brussels court.