For the second time in less than nine months, "unknown" individuals have entered the legal office of Gonzalo Boye and Isabel Elbal, in central Madrid, with the intention of intimidating the lawyers. As with the first time, in January this year, the intrusion occurred a few days before a key date for one of Boye's well-known clients: on that occasion, the deadline to file an appeal against the Supreme Court's decision to maintain the European arrest warrant against exiled Catalan president Puigdemont was approaching; now, we are on the eve of the Supreme Court hearing the appeal against the disqualification from office of current Catalan leader Quim Torra for hanging a banner on the Generalitat palace calling for the release of the political prisoners, and featuring a yellow ribbon.
To treat the break-in at the law firm of Boye-Elbal as simply a matter of bad luck defies any logical reasoning. Due to the expertise of the thieves, and the way they went about their work, they are a technically qualified group; by the moment at which they chose to act, by the demonstration of impunity in striking a second time; and by the confidence which they showed, aware that causing destruction and sowing chaos was enough, since they didn't seek to steal anything of value in the theft. To these two intrusions must be added the police search that the office underwent less than a year ago for an alleged crime of money laundering and of which nothing more was heard despite the deliberate media uproar provoked by the police for a few days.
There are not many precedents in the countries in our neighbourhood for defence lawyers encountering the type of problems which Boye and Elbal are having to cope with. Perhaps in countries like Turkey these situations are not uncommon, but in the European Union, fortunately, they are rare. The party most interested in preventing such occurrences should be the Spanish government, which boasts of being left-wing and progressive - above all, the controversial interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska. It is not, for example, the best calling card for Spain that it should be a member of the German Parliament who denounces the political persecution of Boye.
Last Saturday, Òmnium Cultural reported vandalism on its headquarters; a few hours earlier, the men who in 2013 attacked the Blanquerna centre, the Catalan government's cultural centre in Madrid, had gathered in front of the building itself demanding the acquittal of those convicted, who have not yet entered prison. And at the same time, ongoing news of the patriotic police's dirty war in the Bárcenas case, the same police who, as part of Operation Catalonia, set about fabricating evidence and targetting the independence movement.
In the midst of all this, it is not surprising that a lawyer like Boye might make people uncomfortable, since he has achieved major defeats of Spanish justice in Europe. But in many cases, intimidation ends up providing yet more evidence of the despair of those who undertake dirty war and know they are losing.