From this Thursday, Laura Borràs can no longer act as speaker of the Catalan Parliament. This was agreed by the extraordinary meeting of the procedural body, the Bureau, this Thursday at 12 noon, at which the Catalan Socialists (PSC), Republican Left (ERC) and the Popular Unity Candidatures (CUP) asked to apply to Borràs the article 25.4 of the Parliament's regulations, which establishes that the rights and duties of a Catalan MP must be suspended when they are called to stand trial for alleged offences linked to corruption. The decision comes after the investigating judge of the High Court of Catalonia decided on Tuesday to open a trial against the leader of Together for Catalonia (Junts) to face charges of abuse of authority and document falsification when she was head of the public literary body, the Institute of Catalan Letters. Once this decision was taken, Borràs lost all her rights and duties as an MP, which also means she cannot be speaker of parliament. She wll not have the right to attend parliamentary sessions, and nor will she be able to vote, participate in committees or collect her salary.
Until the last minute, all the parliamentary parties except Junts kept up the pressure on Borràs to ask her to leave voluntarily, mainly to preserve the chamber from a new controversy and not use it for individual purposes. The speaker of the chamber, however, had already announced weeks ago that she did not intend to resign - precisely, as she has been repeating day after day, to preserve the honour of the institution. In fact, as late as Tuesday evening, after the court had formally declared that she would be brought to trial, she published a long thread on Twitter in which she once again defended her innocence in the contractual irregularities case and reiterated that she is a victim of lawfare: "I have said and repeated that I will not resign. Because to do so would mean accepting that I have done what I am accused of having done and I have not. And those who want me dead will have to kill me and get their hands dirty. I have come to carry out independence, not to commit suicide for an autonomous region," proclaimed the speaker, before asking the pro-independence parties not to let her down.
The decision taken at the Bureau was not without controversy, and an additional factor was that hundreds of people gathered outside Parliament, summoned by the speaker's support group, to mobilize against her suspension from the post and denounce that it is "a case of political persecution", to stand up for her presumption of innocence and preserve her fundamental rights. This support group, encouraged by the speaker's circles, created a manifesto a few weeks ago to accompany Borràs in this court case, and has been joined by personalities such as Carles Puigdemont, Quim Torra and Lluís Llach, among a total of 7,000 people.