New move in the European chamber against the parliamentary accreditations of pro-independence Catalan MEPs. The president of the European Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee, the Spanish MEP Adrián Vázquez of the Ciudadanos party, announced today that the credentials of Carles Puigdemont, Toni Comín, Clara Ponsatí and Jordi Solé cannot be verified as deputies because "no documentation has been received that clearly proves that the requirements for the verification of their records have been met." Those of the pro-independence MEPs have been the only 4 credentials that have run into problems out of the 49 that the commission chaired by Vázquez has had to review. In fact, such a situation had never occurred in the European Parliament. The Cs member has called on the president of the Parliament, Roberta Metsola, to request information from Spain.
However, Vázquez is well aware that, after the 2019 elections, Spain's Central Electoral Commission (JEC) refused to include Puigdemont and Comín in the list of MEPs who had been elected because they had not come to the Spanish Congress as requested to formalize the procedures, such as swearing on the Constitution, imposed by Spanish law. It turned out that this was unnecessary: six months later, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that Oriol Junqueras became an MEP the moment the election result was validated, and at that point the European Parliament recognized the seats of the two exiled politicians, Puigdemont and Comin. The same occurred in the case of Ponsatí, who occupied one of the seats left vacant by British MEPs after Brexit came into effect. As for Jordi Solé, he took the seat without swearing on the Constitution but did appear in Congress. However, the Spanish electoral body has not released his documentation either.
Again, the JEC
This chapter had seemed closed after Puigdemont and Comín took their seats, but it has reopened today with Vázquez's warning that the MEPs' credentials cannot be verified because the European Parliament has still not received notification from the Spanish state on the status of the four MEPs and the accompanying documentation. For this reason, the JEC has been asked to "either send the documentation for the verification of credentials or, if this is not possible, give an explanation for its lack and the consequences."
The Ciudadanos MEP has warned that this case does not depend on EU regulations, but rather, that "Spanish law comes into play". "According to the documentation we have, we cannot complete this parliamentary procedure and we are asking them for information so that they can tell us what the next step is," he insisted, although he did not question whether they had the credentials or not, but rather, pointing out the lack of notification by Spain and the JEC.
The lawyer Gonzalo Boye played down the importance of this new controversy, for which he blamed Vázquez personally: "Where the frontier ends, Adrian Vázquez goes on".
MEP Jordi Solé also posted on his Twitter account, sharing the 2019 ruling in which the ECJ made it clear that Oriol Junqueras had been an MEP from the moment the election results were announced.
