He says the former president can meet that requirement “at any time,” but until then he considers his seat vacant.
The Central Electoral Board has informed the European Parliament that it cannot deliver the MEP credential to former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont while he does not meet all the formal requirements contained in Spanish electoral legislation, and he lacks the process of compliance with the Constitution in Madrid before the JEC
“As long as article 224.2 of the LOREG remains in force and no national or European Union court questions its validity, the Spanish electoral administration has the duty to continue applying it,” he stressed. Central Electoral considers that Mr. Puigdemont has not acquired the full status of a deputy to the European Parliament, as he has not fulfilled the requirement of constitutional compliance.
Consequently, for the JEC that seat “must be temporarily vacant until such compliance takes place, with the consequent suspension of its rights and prerogatives in the same terms.”
The same reasons apply to the other three elected MEPs who have not met this requirement either: the former ministers of Junts Toni Comín and Clara Ponsatí, also on the run from the Spanish Justice, and the Republican Jordi Solé, who has no pending cases but has not gone through Madrid to collect your certificate.
That is the answer, collected by Europa Press, that the JEC has agreed to send to the European Parliament before the letter signed by its president, the Maltese Roberta Metsola, asking why Spain had not yet sent the credentials of the 59 MEPs that correspond to it after the European elections of 2019 and the subsequent exit of the United Kingdom from the EU.
Last May, the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee announced that it could not verify the credentials of Puigdemont, Comín, Ponsatí and Solè as they did not have the corresponding documentation. The commission, which is chaired by Citizens deputy Adrián Vázquez, has no certification that these four deputies had met the requirements set by Spanish law before occupying a seat.
In any case, and despite the doubts of the aforementioned Euro-parliamentary commission, in practice this situation does not affect the minutes held by Puigdemont, Comín, Ponsaté and Solé, who continue to carry out their work normally as MEPs in the commissions and plenary sessions in the who participate.
And it is that the MEPs of Junts were recognized as MEPs by the European Parliament after the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) which ruled that Oriol Junqueras, leader of ERC, should have been considered a MEP since the official proclamation of the results of the European elections of May 2019 and enjoy immunity from that very moment despite not going to abide by the Constitution for being in prison.
The JEC, which is made up of thirteen magistrates of the Supreme Court and five jurists proposed by Congress, recalls that that sentence did not question Spanish regulations and that the decision of the European Parliament to recognize these four Catalan independence supporters as MEPs was adopted without consulting the Spanish arbitral body and against the judgment of the Supreme Court.
For the highest arbitration body, if these four elected MEPs have not come to take office before the JEC, it has been a “voluntary” decision, since the other 55 did (several of them also pro-independence). And he adds that they can comply with this procedure “at any time.”
“The Central Electoral Board has communicated to the European Parliament without delay the people who have met the requirements established in Spanish legislation to be able to acquire the full status of deputies to the European Parliament. In the only four cases in which it has not been possible to issue the credential, the reason has been the explicit will of those affected not to meet these requirements, without the Board being able to make up for that voluntary omission; an omission that those affected can resolve at any time by going to meet the same requirement that the other 55 deputies have formalized elected by the Kingdom of Spain”, he argues.
Of course, as long as they don’t, the JEC understands that their seats are temporarily vacant and their parliamentary rights are suspended. “The Central Electoral Board timely informed the European Parliament that, in these four cases, even having been proclaimed elected, the interested parties had not complied with the requirements contemplated in Spanish legislation, for which the consequences provided for in it were applied,” he recalls.
