Ferran Guedea, Mariano Monzó and Josep Maria Ustrell, full academicians of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), responding to the plurality and political neutrality of the institution, have delivered a letter in which they want to open the debate about the process, the judgment and the hard prison sentence that the Spanish Supreme Court has issued against the politicians and activists who organized the referendum for the independence of Catalonia on October 1, 2017. The three academicians, citing prestigious intellectuals, show their disagreement both with the ruling of the high court and with the article that appeared in this same Newsletter with the title “A fair judgment”, in which the also academicians Teresa Freixes and Santiago Castellà argued the cleanliness of the process and the independence, legitimacy and impartiality of the court, appealing where appropriate to the considerations of the Association of European Magistrates for Democracy and Freedoms (Medel), in which Judges for Democracy is integrated.
“We want to express, and we believe that the responsibility of all, politicians, journalists, citizens and obviously academicians, is to avoid attitudes that can ignite the spirits: we must contribute among all to this quiet now so necessary. The academicians of the RAED, with the science, we can help with truth to calm the spirits and not to ignite them, now more than ever”, consider the signatories of the document, addressed to the entire academic community. Guedea, Monzó and Ustrell cite the British writer John Carlin, who after knowing the sentence published in the Spanish newspaper “La Vanguardia” the article “La ley es un burro” (The law is a donkey), in which he was critical of both the decision of the court and the judgment of a case that he considers shouldn’t have left the merely political sphere.
“The defenders of the Kingdom of Spain haven’t given any dead to the Catalans yet, but they insist on giving them martyrs. To the grotesquely disproportionate sentences for the nine for ‘sedition’ (appropriately medieval term), the even more scandalous decision of the judges, if possible, of having kept them in prison for a couple of years before convicting them. That is what Amnesty International calls jail without judgment. Today all that is known is that the Catalan mess is going to be more. Everything and solved everything, the only thing that has been achieved by having abandoned politics by law, the dialogue by the outdated Spanish judiciary, is to foster conflict and heat the burning of independence feeling”, the signatories quote Carlin.
“Everything that John Carlin has written in this opinion article may please some or dislike others, but what is certain is that in these very delicate moments between Spain and Catalonia we must avoid anything that ignites passions and grudges. The vision of whether it’s a fair judgment, as recently published in the RAED Newsletter, or if it’s an unfair judgment, as we present in this article coinciding with Carlin’s vision, is a matter of opinions and facts”, they conclude.
