Ben Emmerson, lawyer of some of the imprisoned politicians, will take the country to the UN for “clear violations of the founding principles”
Redacción Crónica Global
22.06.2019 15:05 h.
The lawyer Ben Emmerson, the same who said that on 11 September 2019 Catalonia would be a republic, calls for “a thorough and independent investigation” and push “a motion of condemn” against Spain in the UN Human Rights Council to “clear violations of fundamental principles”.
Emmerson, defender of the ERC leader, Oriol Junqueras; the former president of the Assemblea Nacional Catalana (ANC), Jordi Sànchez, and the president of Òmnium Cultural, Jordi Cuixart, has written a letter in these terms to the Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions of the UN.
The Government responds
This working group is the same one that described as “arbitrary” the deprivation of liberty of the three independence leaders and demanded their release, which led the Government of Spain to send a letter to the UN High Commissioner to express its displeasure and urge it to revise that document, considering that it contains “errors and distortions”.
In addition, Spain considers that ”there is a conflict of interests” between two of the five members of the working group – whose disqualification formally requested – and the British lawyer, who was part of other similar human rights bodies of the UN and who worked with both in at least two causes.
Emmerson: “formal reprimand to the Government of Spain”
This was also contested by Emmerson, who described as “unfounded” the allegations presented by the Government and “a smokescreen” to “play down the value” of the work carried out by that group. It is, in his opinion, “an extraordinary abuse of the mechanisms of protection of human rights of the United Nations requiring immediate action in the form of a formal reprimand to the Government of Spain”.
This is an “outrage” to the UN that, Emmerson argues, should be “immediately” brought to the Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers and the Special Rapporteur on the protection of human rights defenders, as well as inevitably “rejected as quickly as possible”.
“Serious political corruption”
“The behavior of Spain is a direct affront to the assumption of good faith that is intended to support the work of the Human Rights Council itself”, the text says, which marks the events of “an act of serious political corruption”. Thus, the lawyer asks the working group to send his letter to the High Commissioner for Human Rights, to the Special Rapporteur on the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and to the presidency of the Human Rights Council.
He also demands that the report be published on the cases of other detainees, in particular Joaquim Forn, Josep Rull, Raül Romeva and Dolors Bassa.
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