The Supreme Court has applied amnesty to Meritxell Serret, from ERC, who thus becomes the first consellera of the Government promoting the unilateral referendum of October 1, 2017, to benefit from the amnesty law. Serret, former Minister of Agriculture, was sentenced to one year of disqualification and a fine of 12,000 euros for a serious disobedience offense, for facilitating the 1-O when in 2017 she was part of Carles Puigdemont’s Government, and later filed a cassation appeal against her conviction.
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In a ruling, the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court considers the acts for which Serret was accused to be “amnestied” and, consequently, declares the criminal liability that she may have incurred to be extinguished. “From ERC we are satisfied with the amnesty for Minister Meritxell Serret resolved today by the Supreme Court. The solid strategy followed with the amnesty law is endorsed,” ERC said in a statement. The Republicans highlight that the Supreme Court’s decision comes less than two weeks after the “resounding” endorsement by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) of the amnesty law. Therefore, the statement adds, “it was already inevitable that the Supreme Court would finally do what it should have done from day one: apply the amnesty law approved by the Congress of Deputies.”
“This is exactly what must happen immediately with the rest of the cases, to be able to restore all the political rights of all the repressed people, so that the exiles can return home and be able to discuss politically and democratically about the conflict between Catalonia and the Spanish State without repression,” ERC emphasizes.
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In April 2023, the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) sentenced Serret, then Minister of Foreign Action of the Government presided over by Pere Aragonès, to one year of disqualification and a fine of 12,000 euros for a serious disobedience offense. According to the TSJC ruling, as a member of Puigdemont’s Government, Serret was “perfectly aware” of the five requirements of the Constitutional Court that prevented the 1-O from going ahead, since they were personally notified to her, but she ignored them “consciously and deliberately,” without taking any action to stop the referendum.
The ruling recalled that Serret made a “direct acknowledgment” of the offense when she refused to answer the accusations’ questions and limited herself to making a plea in which she admitted that she did nothing to prevent the referendum due to her “personal convictions about the right to self-determination of the Catalan people.” Serret, who was on the run in Brussels for three years after the unilateral declaration of independence, returned to Spain in 2021 to make herself available to the Supreme Court, seeing her procedural horizon cleared after former ministers Carles Mundó, Meritxell Borràs, and Santi Vila, with a similar role to hers in the 1-O, were sentenced only for disobedience—without prison sentences—and not for embezzlement.
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