The high court points to the “criminal irrelevance” of the facts denounced by the Junts deputies
MADRID, 19 Ene. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Supreme Court (TS) has not admitted for processing the complaint filed by Junts deputies in Parliament against the PP senator Alicia Sánchez-Camacho for an alleged crime of false testimony, in which they considered that she had incurred for denying in parliamentary commission to have knowledge of ‘Operation Catalonia’.
The Criminal Chamber has refused to give judicial review to the complaint for the “criminal irrelevance of the facts”, according to an order dated January 11 for which Judge Javier Hernández has been a rapporteur.
The complaint maintained that Sánchez-Camacho had committed false testimony because in his appearances on April 10, 2015 and July 24, 2017 in two investigation commissions, first, he denied having met Victoria Álvarez, former partner of Jordi Pujol junior, and, later, the existence of the so-called ‘Operation Catauna’.
The 31 Catalan deputies based their accusations on the conversations between Sánchez-Camacho and José Manuel Villarejo, which the now retired commissioner recorded and which ended up being broadcast.
It is worth remembering another recording, that of a conversation that the ‘popular’ leader and Álvarez had in July 2010 at the La Camarga restaurant in Barcelona, ??a matter that was investigated by a court in the city of Barcelona and that is part of one of the separate pieces of the ‘Villarejo case’.
For the Second Chamber, the facts reported in the complaint “do not identify the appearance of typicality”, “which deprives the alleged opening of an investigation process of any justification.”
The magistrates explain that the fact that a person appearing affirms that he did not know of the existence of ‘Operation Catalonia’ lacks any criminal relevance because “it is the answer to a question that does not seek to obtain information about a fact, but rather about what is very different, an evaluative construction of the presumed facts”.
In the Supreme Court’s opinion, although the PP senator denied the existence of ‘Operation Catalonia’, “this in itself is not untruthful, even if the person asking the question is convinced that said operation existed.”
“What is decisive in measuring the veracity or falsity of a response is not the nominal category used to formulate the question,” he reasons, but rather “it must be the compatibility of the response with the data available to the person appearing in relation to the specific events that are considered to have occurred”.
The magistrates also do not believe that Sánchez-Camacho lied in the first appearance, the one related to his contacts with the ex-girlfriend of Jordi Pujol’s son. In this sense, they consider the “contrast information” presented in the complaint “very debatable”, that is, the recordings of Villarejo.
“The highly debatable contrasting information confirms, precisely, the non-existence of a relationship between the defendant and Álvarez after the meeting narrated by the person appearing before the Commission,” they affirm.
For the Supreme Court, “that years later he stated in a conversation with a third party that he could have had two more contacts without any relational significance lacks any typical meaning.”