This Tuesday it will be a year since judge Carmen Lamela of Spain's National Audience court ordered that Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart were to be jailed preventively in Soto del Real prison. A year deprived of their liberty, with their release denied several times by the Supreme Court judge who took over the case, Pablo Llarena; at present they remain locked up in the penitentiary of Lledoners. Since that 16th October 2017 many things have happened, but none of them have affected the deprivation of the liberty of Sànchez and Cuixart, which can now be seen very clearly as unfair and disproportionate. If there were any doubts before, documentaries like the one on the events of 20th September, when the Civil Guard raided the Catalan ministry of economy, have made it glaringly obvious that on that day, the Jordis played the role of peacemakers.
However, the false account of what happened has followed the course plotted out for it. To teach someone a lesson you don't start with the truth, but rather from a narrative that is repeated a thousand times and shared a million times. Since then, two major political developments have taken place: the pro-independence groups gained an unequivocal victory in the elections of 21st December; and in May their votes changed the course of history in Spain, sending Pedro Sánchez into the Spanish prime minister's seat and expelling the government headed by Mariano Rajoy
It is important to highlight all this, when there is now news on the presentation of the written indictment against the Jordis and the rest of the Catalans political prisoners by Spain's Public Prosecutor's Office. It seems that chief prosecutor María José Segarra will maintain the charges of rebellion (a minimum of fifteen years of imprisonment) and of sedition (a minimum of ten) in accordance with the thinking of her predecessors in the post under the Popular Party (PP) government. The Spanish judiciary's grand farce, already rejected in the courts of Germany and Belgium and likely to have met the same fate in the United Kingdom and Switzerland if the European arrest warrant had not been withdrawn, continues on its path as if nothing had happened. Now, moreover, there is a will to convince us by means of appropriate leaks that, even though the rebellion charges are to be maintained, the sentences to be demanded will be at the lower end of what is possible for the crime.
In this situation, it takes quite a nerve to ask the Catalan independence parties to help you pass Spain's annual budget. "It's politics; not everything is the return of the exiles and the release of the prisoners, the right to self-determination, a referendum and independence," says one pro-independence leader who is open to negotiation.
And the Jordis, this Tuesday, will have spent an entire year in prison.