Laura Borràs will have 10 more days as a deputy in the Parliament of Catalonia. After a meeting of more than three hours, Spain's Central Electoral Commission (JEC) has decided to grant a period of 10 working days to the first deputy speaker of the Catalan chamber, Alba Vergés, to say whether she will remove the seat from the president of the Together for Catalonia (Junts) party. Within this period, the Catalan chamber is required to communicate to the JEC the decisions it has taken regarding Borràs after the High Court of Catalonia found her guilty of abuse of authority and document falsification and sentenced her to years of imprisonment and prohibition from holding public office. In its conclusion, the electoral body demands to be told the "decisions, resolutions or other measures that the institution may have adopted in relation to the matter", while leaving room for the Catalan Parliament and Laura Borràs herself to appeal.
With this move, the administrative body responds to the requests of the People's Party (PP), Ciudadanos (Cs) and Vox, ruling out both the handing on of the procedure to the Provincial Electoral Board of Barcelona and giving a straight order to Parliament to remove the seat directly. Instead, it opts for an intermediate path, passing the responsibility to Vergés to clarify what actions she has taken and will take in relation to the credentials of Laura Borràs and establishing a link between the situation of Borràs and that of the former CUP deputy Pau Juvillà, whose credentials were withdrawn by order of the JEC after it requested information from Parliament. It also sees the case as "analogous" to that of ex-Catalan president Quim Torra, who was also stripped of his seat although, unlike in the Torra and Juvillà cases, Vergés will this time have to explain that it was the Bureau of Parliament that suspended the speaker and MP from her functions following the opening of a trial "for crimes related to corruption", according to the regulation.
The justification
In its arguments, the Central Electoral Commission explains why action must be taken against Borràs and recalls that the TSJC convicted her as the author of a crime of abuse of authority and that, according to article 6.2 b) of the Spanish electoral law (LOREG), those convicted of such a crime, even before appeal processes are exhausted, are "ineligible" to hold elected public office. In the case of Borràs, the JEC emphasizes that the abuse of authority took place as a crime against the public administration. In its resolution, the JEC also cites other judicial decisions that show that the causes of ineligibility for office established in this article constitute an "automatic consequence" of the penalty imposed in the sentence. In this regard, it emphasizes that "the causes of ineligibility are also those of incompatibility", which means that she cannot stand for election and must automatically lose her seat.
It also emphasizes that the Catalan Parliament does not have "exclusive competence" to apply the aforementioned "subsequent ineligibility" and, the body adds, the electoral administration can directly apply the LOREG to strip the member of the seat and "restore the composition of the Parliament by issuing MP credentials to the corresponding candidate", which in this case would be the Demòcrates party spokesperson, Toni Castellà. At this point, the electoral body also refers to the case of the ex-deputy Juvillà, who ended up losing his seat despite the appeal he presented to the Supreme Court. The body enters into precedents and emphasises that on December 22nd, 2021, it had already asked Borràs, when she did not yet have her functions as speaker suspended, to say what she had done with the situation of Juvillà, who ended up losing his seat without a final sentence after several warnings from the JEC.
"At least 12 rights violated" in trial
The administrative route thus unfolds in parallel with that of the appeal against the verdict of the TSJC. This Wednesday, Borràs's defence lawyers presented the arguments for the cassation appeal that they will present to the TSJC against the sentence of 4 and a half years in prison, a 13-year ban from public employment and fine of 36,000 euros for splitting contracts when she was director of the Institute of Catalan Letters (ILC). Lawyers Gonzalo Boye and Isabel Elbal argue that in this criminal trial at least 12 rights were violated: the right to the judge predetermined by law; the right to an impartial judge; the right to the presumption of innocence, the right to effective judicial protection, the right to a defence, the right to secrecy of communications, the right to privacy and the protection of the virtual environment, the right to a process with due process, the principle of legality, the right to personal liberty, the principle of proportionality and the right to representation and political participation.