YEAR OF THE KANGAROO

This month will see the start of what must be some of the odd­est ju­di­cial pro­ceed­ings in what used to be called the free world. Nine po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers will be put on trial to­gether, some of them for hav­ing helped or­gan­ise an in­de­pen­dence ref­er­en­dum (which was legal or not, de­pend­ing on whether you defer to Span­ish, Cata­lan or in­ter­na­tional law); two of them, for hav­ing made a speech in front of 40,000 demon­stra­tors and then ask­ing those same demon­stra­tors to dis­perse; and one of them, Carme For­cadell, the for­mer Speaker in the Cata­lan par­lia­ment, for hav­ing al­lowed a de­bate (on in­de­pen­dence) in that self-same par­lia­ment, one of whose prin­ci­ple func­tions is to house de­bates. Most of these peo­ple have been in jail for sev­eral months or over a year, and are ac­cused of vi­o­lent re­bel­lion, sedi­tion, and mis­use of pub­lic funds. A tricky busi­ness, that men­tion of vi­o­lence, given that on Oc­to­ber 1, 2017, brute force was all but ex­clu­sively used by the Span­ish po­lice against vot­ers. Which is why the nom­i­nally so­cial­ist Span­ish for­eign min­is­ter, Josep Bor­rell, re­cently re­sorted to the time-ho­n­oured tra­di­tion of his right-wing pre­de­ces­sors: lying through his teeth to the for­eign press and the EU (specif­i­cally, he said that many im­ages of the gra­tu­itous po­lice vi­o­lence came from servers in Rus­sia and Venezuela). This was coun­ter­bal­anced by a de­tailed re­cent re­port com­piled by the pres­ti­gious doc­tor and uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor Núria Pujol-Moix, which proved de­fin­i­tively that on Oct 1, the Span­ish forces of law and order in­flicted wounds on 1,066 peo­ple; 68 of those wounded were over 65, of whom 13 were over 79; 1,443 peo­ple were beaten with trun­cheons, punched, kicked, pushed, thrown to the ground or down stair­ways, dragged by the ears, hair or neck or shot at with rub­ber bul­lets (one man lost an eye); 34 peo­ple suf­fered trau­matic brain in­juries; only 20% of vic­tims were hit on those parts of the body ac­cept­able to po­lice pro­to­col; 80%, on body parts vul­ner­a­ble to dam­age. What’s more, the Amer­i­can data an­a­lyst Joe Brew has proven that in tweets made on and im­me­di­ately after Ref­er­en­dum Day, only the pro-indy par­ties talked about vi­o­lence (that in­flicted by the po­lice); the union­ist par­ties didn’t men­tion the word vi­o­lence at all (they nat­u­rally wanted to keep mum about the po­lice bru­tal­ity; but if the vot­ers had been vi­o­lent, they would have tweeted it from the rooftops). De­spite which, it seems that Madrid’s up­side down ver­sion of events will be the one that for­eign gov­ern­ments ac­cept, if a re­cent in­ci­dent in the West­min­ster par­lia­ment is any­thing to go by: last month, Ron­nie Cowen MP asked the British min­is­ter for For­eign Af­fairs when he was going to protest about the con­tin­ued im­pris­on­ment of Carme For­cadell. The min­is­ter re­torted that the UK gov­ern­ment would fully sup­port the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the rule of law in ‘de­mo­c­ra­tic’ Spain. Clearly, the min­is­ter didn’t re­alise – who does out there? – that for Madrid, the unity of the state trumps human rights, po­lit­i­cal rights and, yes, the rule of law it­self. If a law can be seen to pro­tect those de­fend­ing Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence, the Span­ish ju­di­ciary will sim­ply skip over it. A kan­ga­roo court in­deed.