Catalan separatist Clara Ponsati, who had been living in exile for five years to escape prosecution, made her surprise return to Spain on Tuesday, where she was arrested and then released after being heard by a court.
Ms Ponsati, 66, no longer faces a prison sentence due to a recent reform of the Spanish government's Penal Code.
"I came to denounce the systematic violation of our rights," she told the press in Barcelona, a few hours after crossing the border with France by car.
Very shortly after this press conference, the separatist was arrested under an arrest warrant issued by the Spanish courts, the regional police told AFP.
Ms. Ponsati, who benefits from her immunity as an MEP, had indeed the obligation to appear before the courts to inform her of her presence on Spanish territory and to be heard. What she had indicated refusing to do.
She was released after being heard for about five hours in court. Several hundred demonstrators gathered during this time in front of the courthouse waving Catalan independence flags.
Main figure of the separatist movement, the former president of the Catalan government Carles Puigdemont denounced on Twitter an "illegal arrest".
The current president of Catalonia, the separatist Pere Aragonès, welcomed in a press release the return of Ms. Ponsati. But the fact that she was forcibly taken to court "once again highlights the fact that the repression against separatism continues", he said.
Ms. Ponsati no longer faces a prison sentence since a recent controversial reform of the Spanish government of socialist Pedro Sanchez, intended to give pledges to the Catalan separatist movement, part of which supports it.
This reform led to the abolition of the offense of sedition of which was accused, like other separatists, Ms. Ponsati, who is now only prosecuted for disobedience.
Like Carles Puigdemont, Ms. Ponsati had fled abroad after the failure at the end of October 2017 of the attempted secession of Catalonia.
This former member of the regional government of Mr. Puigdemont, in which she was in charge of Education, first went into exile in Belgium before leaving for Scotland where she was professor of economics at the university of St. Andrews.
Spain unsuccessfully demanded his extradition until the Scottish justice abandoned the procedure in August 2021, due to the return of the separatist to Belgium, after his election to the European Parliament.
Carles Puigdemont also benefited in January from the abolition of the offense of sedition. But he still risks a prison sentence, certainly less heavy, if he were tried one day in Spain where he is still accused of embezzlement of public funds.
MEP like Clara Ponsati, Mr. Puigdemont has lived in Belgium since leaving Spain in 2017.
The independence government of Mr. Puigdemont had tried in October 2017 to secede from Spain by organizing a referendum of self-determination, prohibited by justice, before the local Parliament unilaterally declared the independence of the region.
Madrid then suspended the region's autonomy while the separatist leaders were imprisoned or fled abroad.
Coming to power less than a year later, Pedro Sanchez has made appeasement in Catalonia one of his top priorities.
He thus resumed an open dialogue with part of the Catalan separatists, still in power in the region, and pardoned in 2021 the nine separatist leaders sentenced in 2019 to sentences ranging from 9 to 13 years in prison for their role in the events. of 2017.
03/29/2023 00:26:15 - Barcelona (AFP) - © 2023 AFP
