Joan Josep Nuet is finally sitting in the dock to answer the accusations against him over the Catalan independence referendum and the events leading up to it. Three and a half years after the referendum on 1st October 2017, the Catalan politician has appeared before the Supreme Court. His case has jumped from court to court, first due to the demands of the investigating judge Pablo Llarena and then through the change of status of the defendant, who in 2017 was a member of the Bureau of the Catalan Parliament for the left-wing grouping of that time, Catalunya Sí que es Pot (CSQP), and is now an MP in the Congress of Deputies in Madrid for pro-independence ERC.
It is a political trajectory that has affected the handling of his case by the courts. Hence, he appeared today before the Supreme Court, accused of disobedience of the Constitutional Court through his votes to allow the legislation on the referendum and the independence process to be debated by the Catalan Parliament.
Nuet faces both advantages and disadvantages due to this singular treatment by the court. Being tried alone, he is able to distance himself from the positions of the other members of the Bureau who voted the same way as he did and ended up being disqualified from holding office for 20 months. But against him, is the fact that the other members of the Bureau were indeed convicted. With his argument, the MP hopes to avoid the disqualification from office that would interrupt his political career, and the case he is making sounds more like it comes from a Nuet who is skeptical about independence, than the Nuet who then separated himself from CSQP as he did, to eventually join ERC in 2019.
The basis for the MP's case revolves around a claim that he wanted to make the pro-independence parties see reason and that the decisions of the Parliament were constitutional: "I was trying to allow pro-independence ideas to be passed through a constitutional filter."
Thus, he tried this Wednesday to convince the court that his role in the Bureau was to comply with the law, and to enforce it, and that his vote in favour of holding the referendum was because he wanted it to take place within the constitutional framework and via an agreement with the Spanish state. “Everything is defensible to the extent that the Constitution can be reformed to accommodate it,” he said. He underlined that "the Constitutional Court had the last word" on all initiatives and that until that point there had been, from the court, "respect for parliamentary debate".
Not even the lawyers knew
Under questioning from the public prosecutors, Joan Josep Nuet explained that he took a stand along with the pro-independence majority of the Bureau when it pressed ahead with its conclusions to introduce the proposed referendum and independence laws. He defined that moment - of historic plenary sessions and transcendental meetings of the Bureau in September 2017 - as a chaotic moment in which members of the Bureau did not read what they voted for and not even the parliamentary lawyers were sure what was legal or illegal: "In the dynamic in which we were in, not even the lawyers themselves knew if it was constitutional."
“The meeting was a real mess,” he said. And he admitted: "I did not read any of the 120 pages" of the motions for resolutions that were put to the vote." Nuet reiterated time and time again that he was just "carrying out politics" and that he "believed he was assisting the Constitutional Court." "That was my intention. An intention that did not succeed," he concluded.
"I absolutely did not want to use my vote to disobey or break the constitutional doctrine. When I voted, I believed that I was not ignoring the requirements of the Constitutional Court," said the then-CSQP deputy.
In fact, Nuet even offered got close to offering remorse at the end of his statement: "Everything was new, everything was happening for the first time. Today I would do things differently, but to say that today is very easy."
The trial continues.