European Court of Human Rights precedent from the case of Kurdish opposition MP Selahattin Demirtaş in Turkey is not relevant for Spain's Constitutional Court. This Tuesday, judges in Madrid again unanimously rejected the release from provisional detention of Catalan pro-independence leaders Jordi Turull, Josep Rull and Jordi Sànchez. The three had cited the Turkish case in their appeals. This is the third time the Constitutional Court has refused to even grant them bail.
The judges don't believe last November's ruling by Strasbourg is comparable with the current case. They argue that, firstly, it's not a "novel circumstance" and, secondly, note that that verdict against Turkey is not yet final, pending a decision from the European court's Grand Chamber.
On 26th November, the prisoners Jordi Turull, Josep Rull and Jordi Sànchez, represented by lawyer Jordi Pina, presented an appeal to the Constitutional Court for their release from pretrial jail, based on that Strasbourg decision.
According to their defence, the European resolution was "perfectly comparable to the present" case, "since the sentence deals with defining what the political rights are of a parliamentary office holder who finds themselves in provisional detention and in what situations their rights are violated by a prolonged cautionary deprival of liberty".
The court had already rejected a first petition on the same terms on 20th December when, as this time, they argued that the verdict from the European Court of Human Rights cannot be considered a "novel circumstance".