1-O judicial anomaly: cases across 4 courts

The Supreme Court (SC) up­held its de­ci­sion to keep hold of the 1-O trial, de­spite de­mands from de­fence teams to hold the trial in Barcelona. How­ever, un­pre­dictably, the court de­clined to try the six for­mer mem­bers of the Com­mit­tee of Par­lia­ment ac­cused of dis­obe­di­ence. In­stead these cases will be heard by the Su­pe­rior Tri­bunal of Jus­tice of Cat­alo­nia. The SC has cre­ated an anom­aly, in that cases re­lat­ing to 1-O and the in­de­pen­dence process will be judged by four dif­fer­ent courts in two cities: Court of In­struc­tion num­ber 13 of Barcelona, the Su­pe­rior Tri­bunal of Jus­tice of Cat­alo­nia, the Na­tional Court - in the case of the Major Josep Lluís Trap­ero- and the Supreme Court in Madrid. 2019 is a mu­nic­i­pal and au­tonomous com­mu­nity elec­tion year, so the Supreme Court wants tri­als to begin in Jan­u­ary and have sen­tences by sum­mer. It will try civil so­ci­ety lead­ers Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sànchez, and for­mer pres­i­dent of Par­lia­ment Carme For­cadell - all ac­cused of re­bel­lion and sedi­tion, which carry po­ten­tial sen­tences of 25 years. De­spite the sig­nif­i­cant sen­tence lengths, Manuel Marchena, Pres­i­dent of the Penal Cham­ber of the Supreme Court, in a re­port yes­ter­day, also ruled out hav­ing si­mul­ta­ne­ous trans­la­tion dur­ing the tri­als, so that the ac­cused can use their mother tongue, Cata­lan, dur­ing their de­fences.