Two hours. A miserly two hours. This was all the time that jailed Catalan minister Dolors Bassa was permitted on Saturday to visit her 87-year-old mother, convalescing in Girona hospital, where she had just had surgery. The time that was granted her by the Supreme Court's Sala de Vacaciones (literally, the Court's holiday-period tribunal) in leave from the Puig de les Basses prison, having been locked up for the last 188 days. The injustice of a case in process which is based on narratives that have little or nothing to do with what actually happened has, in this case, a cruel, inhumane element: the prison on remand which has been recklessly applied to the accused. And which leads to situations as extreme as this, among other consequences.
A mother who is ill, a prisoner on remand, a convoy of several police cars driving the Catalan minister to the hospital are elements that would allow, if there was a will, to impose measures much more ample than a miserable two hours of leave. Especially since it is clear that minister Bassa had opted to accept going to prison and not into exile like other members of the Catalan government for reasons fundamentally family-related. She went to Brussels in late October last year and then returned to Barcelona to appear before the Supreme Court; she was released in December and then returned to prison in March, a time more than sufficient to move her residence to another country if she had wanted to, but she didn't do that either. And the explanation that was made to justify the two hour limit was also gratuitous: it was, they said, to prevent her leave from prison to be used for a different purpose from that authorized.
Why so much added cruelty? It is difficult to understand until you analyze the overall situation. The exemplary punishment which is intended. A Spain united around judge Llarena in order to avoid his appearance before the judge in Brussels who has summonsed him on September 4th. A political class of the Popular Party (PP) and Ciudadanos (Cs), a judiciary and the media calling for the state to take charge of his defence against statements that have no direct relationship with the immunity he possesses under Spanish jurisdiction. And demanding that the lawyer to be hired in Belgium to defend him should be paid by the Spanish state.
Bassa and Llarena. Two sides of a single coin. Which one of them is deprived of rights?