Spanish examining magistrate Pablo Llarena has sent more information to the United Kingdom to support his European Arrest Warrant against former Catalan minister Clara Ponsatí.
On Wednesday, after a specialist lawyer reviewed the warrant, the UK told Spain it would take "no further action [...] at this time", but that it would reconsider if proved with additional information. They later withdrew their initial characterisation of the warrant as "disproportionate".
Llarena has written a short document describing the decisions by Spain's Constitutional Court that the Catalan government disobeyed in 2017. He argues that Ponsatí followed a plan "to force and obtain the independence of the autonomous community of Catalonia".
He says that, as Catalan education minister, she gave orders for schools to be offered for use as polling stations in the referendum. Additionally, he argues she did this knowing that the Constitutional Court has suspended the referendum law and adds that her instructions also contravened orders given by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia to the police to close polling stations and prevent the vote from going ahead.
The judge charges her with the same crimes Dolors Bassa was convicted of, sedition and misuse of public funds. Sedition, in Spanish law, is defined as when a person "rises up publicly and tumultuously" to prevent the law from being enforced. Neither the original warrant, nor today's supplemental information, describes any violence or public disorder to meet that definition.
"All that with the objective of managing to change the prevailing legal and constitutional order," the report concludes. It was sent, in Spanish and English, through the SIRENE cooperation system.