Teresa Freixes, professor of Constitutional Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, full academician and secretary general of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), published on January 20 in the digital newspaper “El Catalán” the study “Sobre las garantías procesales y España en el contexto europeo. Un análisis de cara al juicio del ‘Procés'” (On procedural guarantees and Spain in the European context: An analysis on the judgment to the Catalan political process), where she defends the independence of Spanish justice and exposes the guarantee mechanisms that protect both the European Union and the main international organizations and institutions from a strictly legal to political or humanitarian scope.
Point by point, the academician argues how the judges who have instructed and will judge the case meet the requirements of independence and impartiality, how the defendants have been guaranteed the right to defend themselves and the right to present their judicial evidence, how the presumption of innocence has been guaranteed and how another of the challenges of criminal law will be met to issue the sentence within a reasonable time. Although Freixes also demands that, according to the Rule of Law, judgments must be fulfilled.
Dra. Teresa Freixes
“All these guarantees apply to the defendants who are in prison, regardless of their origin, condition or economic situation -the academician argues-. And they also apply to those involved in the process. The associations of European lawyers, the progressive Medel Association among them, consider Spain as one of the most guarantor countries, and Spain is one of the countries that, taking into account the statistics derived from the date of accession to the Convention of Human Rights and that there is no Council of Europe country that has not been convicted of any kind of violation of the agreement, has received fewer sentences from the Strasbourg Court“.
Founder and president of the Civic Concordia platform, the academician ends her reflection reviewing the reports on the European Court of Human Rights that place Spain in the top group of the 20 democracies in full procedural guarantees, according to the recent British magazine “The Economist”.
