MADRID — The Spanish Supreme Court on Monday sentenced former leaders of the Catalan independence movement to lengthy prison terms after finding them guilty of sedition for their botched attempt to break away from Spain in 2017.
The court verdicts followed a landmark trial in which 12 leaders of the Catalan independence movement stood accused of crimes ranging from rebellion and sedition to misuse of public funds.
The court sentenced nine of the 12 former leaders to prison for sedition, as well as for misusing public funds. The remaining three were sentenced for the lesser crime of disobedience during the events two years ago, which culminated in an unconstitutional referendum followed by a declaration of independence in October 2017.
The ruling came amid another buildup of tensions in Catalonia, the wealthy northeastern region where the Spanish authorities have recently deployed anti-riot police to prepare for any major street protests in response to the court’s decision.
It also came ahead of a repeat national election on Nov. 10, called after Pedro Sánchez, the caretaker Socialist prime minister, failed to get sufficient support from smaller parties in Parliament to form a government. It will be Spain’s fourth election in four years, highlighting the country’s political polarization and fragmentation.
The verdicts were handed down just before some of the defendants completed two years in jail, after being denied bail in October 2017.
While the seven judges of the Supreme Court found the Catalan leaders guilty of secession, they did not sentence them for rebellion, a crime that could have resulted in prison sentences of as many as 25 years.
The former Catalan leaders could still appeal their case before Spain’s Constitutional Court, if they could demonstrate that their fundamental rights had been violated, as well as to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
The verdicts also came as some former Catalan leaders have been awaiting a separate European ruling over whether they should be granted immunity as elected members of the European Parliament, after winning their seats in European elections last May.
Among those elected are Mr. Puigdemont and Mr. Junqueras, who is the leader of the Esquerra Republicana party that is now the largest Catalan force within the Spanish Parliament.
Spain's Supreme Court has sentenced nine Catalan separatist leaders to between nine and 13 years in prison for sedition over their role in an independence referendum in 2017.
Three other defendants were found guilty of disobedience and fined, but will not serve prison sentences.
The 12 politicians and activists had all denied the charges.
Separatists in Catalonia were planning mass civil disobedience ahead of the verdict.
The prosecution had sought up to 25 years in prison for Oriol Junqueras, the former vice-president of Catalonia and the highest-ranking pro-independence leader on trial.
Junqueras was handed the longest sentence of 13 years for sedition and misuse of public funds.
The other sentences ranged from nine years upwards.
The nine leaders were acquitted of a more serious charge of rebellion.
Following the court's verdict, Catalan independence supporters marched in Barcelona displaying banners that read "free political prisoners" while urging others to "take to the streets".
Over the weekend, hundreds of protesters rallied in the city.
In 2017, police and protesters clashed in the streets when Catalonia's pro-independence leaders went ahead with a referendum ruled illegal by Spain's constitutional court.
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Monday's ruling comes after four months of hearings.
During their closing arguments in June, defence lawyers told the court their clients denied the charges of rebellion and sedition, but admitted to the lesser charge of disobedience, which could have seen them banned from public office but avoiding prison.
Who are the 12 Catalan leaders?
Some held prominent positions in Catalonia's government and parliament, while others were influential activists and cultural advocates.
Before the trial ended, the 12 defendants were each given 15 minutes to present their arguments to prosecutors on the final day on 12 June.
They told the court in Madrid they were victims of an injustice in a trial built on "false" charges:
What they said in their defence
Oriol Junqueras, former vice-president of Catalonia: "Voting and defending the republic from a parliament cannot be a crime."
Jordi Cuixart, president of Catalan language and culture organisation Òmnium Cultural: "What we did on 1 October [holding the 2017 referendum] was an exercise of collective dignity."
Carme Forcadell, ex-speaker of the Catalan parliament: "I didn't take part in any strategy, I restricted myself to fulfilling my duties as parliament speaker."
Jordi Turull, former Catalan government spokesman: "We weren't looking to involve people [in the bid for independence], that already existed, and so a political solution had to be provided."
Joaquim Forn, former Catalan interior minister: "I defended the referendum as a politician, but told Catalan police to follow court orders."
Jordi Sànchez, activist and ex-president of the Catalan National Assembly: "I am the victim of an injustice - there are no ideas or principles that should be silenced."
Raül Romeva, former external relations minister: "There is no international treaty prohibiting the right to self-determination. Not even the Spanish Constitution."
Dolors Bassa, ex-labour minister: "It was always clear to us that if a lot of people turned out to vote, it would help us when negotiating [with Madrid]... independence was always seen as something to be agreed."
Josep Rull, former territorial minister: "People vote and it's good that parties deliver... our manifesto was not challenged in court."
Carles Mundó, former justice minister: "The vote was not paid for with public funds, I saw [it] as a political protest."
Meritxell Borràs, former governance minister: "[The vote was] a political expression [that] held no legal consequences."
Santi Vila, former business minister: "I saw the referendum as a political protest."
Nine of the defendants had already spent months in pre-trial detention. The remaining three were earlier released on bail.
Carles Puigdemont, the former Catalan president, escaped trial after fleeing Spain in late October 2017 before he could be arrested, along with four others.
How did they end up in court?
Prosecutors argued that the unilateral declaration of independence was an attack on the Spanish state and accused some of those involved of a serious act of rebellion.
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They also said that separatist leaders had misused public funds while organising the 2017 referendum.
Prosecutors argued the leaders had carried out a "perfectly planned strategy... to break the constitutional order and obtain the independence of Catalonia" illegally.
Forcadell, the former parliament speaker who read out the independence result on 27 October 2017, was also accused of allowing parliamentary debates on independence despite warnings from Spain's Constitutional Court.
Some of the leaders, speaking to the BBC ahead of the trial, said the proceedings were political in nature. Any violence, they said, was on the part of police and committed against voters in a crackdown which made headlines around the world.
Three weeks after the banned 2017 vote, the Catalan parliament declared an independent republic.
Madrid stepped in to impose its rule on the region, and several Catalan leaders fled or were arrested.
What is behind the Catalonia controversy?
Catalan nationalists have long complained that their region, which has a distinct history dating back almost 1,000 years, sends too much money to poorer parts of Spain, as taxes are controlled by Madrid.
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The wealthy region is home to about 7.5 million people, with their own language, parliament, flag and anthem.
In September, a march in Barcelona in support of Catalonia's independence from Spain drew crowds of about 600,000 people - one of the lowest turnouts in the eight-year history of the annual rally.
President Trump on Sunday said there is widespread support in Washington to impose new sanctions against Turkey over its swift incursion into northern Syria.
Specific details about the sanctions were unclear but Trump said on Twitter, "Treasury is ready to go, additional legislation may be sought. There is great consensus on this. Turkey has asked that it not be done. Stay tuned!"
Reuters, citing an unnamed U.S. official, reported that the measures were being “worked out at all levels of the government for rollout.”
Over the past five days, Turkish troops and their allies have pushed their way into northern towns and villages, clashing with the Kurdish fighters over a stretch of 125 miles. The offensive has displaced at least 130,000 people.
On Sunday, at least nine people, including five civilians, were killed in Turkish airstrikes on a convoy in the Syrian border town of Ras al-Ayn, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Syrian Kurdish officials.
The New York Times reported that the troop advancement was so fast, they seized a road that complicated the U.S. troop pullout.
Trump has faced criticism over his decision to give Turkey a green light for the offensive. Critics said the U.S. abandoned its Kurdish allies that were credited for their actions to defeat ISIS. Trump has insisted that he wants to pull U.S. troops out of endless wars.
Trump was criticized by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., for his initial decision, but was praised Sunday night for working with Congress “to impose crippling sanctions against Turkeys (sic) outrageous aggression/war crimes in Syria.”
"We have victory," jubilant PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski told supporters at party headquarters in Warsaw.
"We have four years of hard work ahead. Poland must change more and it must change for the better."
A party that delivers
By Adam Easton, BBC News, Warsaw
Law and Justice is on course to win the highest percentage of votes since democracy was restored here in 1989.
If the partial result is confirmed, the party would have a slightly increased majority and a strong mandate to continue its socially conservative programme.
Law and Justice has pledged to continue its controversial reform of the judiciary despite opposition from the European Commission, which says the independence of Poland's judges is being eroded. That issue has not dented Law and Justice's popularity.
Instead the party has reaped the rewards of its generous welfare scheme, which has benefitted millions of families. For the first time in years, it has proposed a balanced budget for next year despite economists' warnings that the scheme would ruin public finances.
Law and Justice now has a reputation of a party that delivers on its promises.
Results from 42% of constituencies published early on Monday suggest a slight increase for PiS on the 231 MPs they currently hold in the 460-seat lower house.
Exit polls suggested turnout was more than 60%.
The left-wing coalition Lewica is expected to come third. Lewica was also celebrating its predicted result after left-wing parties lost their seats four years ago due to fragmentation.
Robert Biedroń, one of the bloc's three co-leaders and Poland's first openly gay lawmaker, told a rally: "We are returning to parliament. We are going back to where the Polish left has always belonged."
LGBT rights became the single biggest cultural issue ahead of the election. PiS - and the Roman Catholic Church - maintain that gay rights are a threat to traditional Polish families and values.
The governing party had argued that reforms were needed to remove judges appointed during the communist era and to make the court more efficient.
But the European Commission - the EU's executive arm - argued that the reforms undermined the rule of law by giving the governing party control of the judiciary.
Washington — The U.S. is "preparing to evacuate" about 1,000 U.S. troops from northern Syria "as safely and quickly as possible," Defense Secretary Mark Esper told "Face the Nation" in an interview airing Sunday.
The move comes a week after President Trump announced the repositioning of several dozen American troops embedded with Kurdish forces in northern Syria, opening the door for a Turkish offensive against the Syrian Defense Forces (SDF), the main U.S. allies in the fight against ISIS.
"In the last 24 hours, we learned that [the Turks] likely intend to extend their attack further south than originally planned, and to the west," Esper said. "We also have learned in the last 24 hours that the ... SDF are looking to cut a deal, if you will, with the Syrians and the Russians to counterattack against the Turks in the north."
Esper told "Face the Nation" the troops remaining in the country were caught between Turkish forces and the SDF. According to the United Nations, more than 100,000 internally displaced people are fleeing the violence.
"And so we find ourselves, we have American forces likely caught between two opposing advancing armies, and it's a very untenable situation," Esper said. "So I spoke with the president last night, after discussions with the rest of the national security team, and he directed that we begin a deliberate withdrawal of forces from northern Syria."
Asked if the U.S. had the authority to return fire, Esper said U.S. troops "have the right to self defense and we will execute it if necessary."
Shortly after the initial pullback last week, Turkey began its onslaught, attacking the northern part of the country. On Saturday, the fourth day of the offensive, Turkish forces captured a key border town from the SDF. ISIS prisoners were also able to escape imprisonment when Turkish artillery hit a prison compound.
While the U.S. move is a gift to the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it's seen as a stark betrayal of the Kurds who have fought alongside U.S. forces for years to defeat ISIS. The Kurds, former U.S. officials and senior Republican lawmakers have warned the U.S. pullout from the region could give ISIS room to rebuild, and send a message that the U.S. is willing to abandon close allies when the political winds change.
Turkey-backed Syrian fighters enter Ras al-Yan, Syria on Oct. 12.
BEIRUT — Videos posted on social media showing at least one execution-style killing have called into question the discipline of the soldiers engaged in Turkey’s five-day old effort to seize territory controlled by the Kurds allies in northeastern Syria.
The most gruesome and explicit of the videos shows Turkish-allied Syrian fighters pumping bursts of automatic fire into the body of a bound man lying on the side of a desert road as a gunman shouts to his comrades to take his phone and film him doing the shooting. Another trembling, handcuffed man crouches on the opposite side of the road as the shooting erupts. “Kill them,” one man is heard shouting.
The video is one of a series of photographs and videos posted on Twitter accounts of the Turkish-backed rebel groups and circulated by the U.S.-allied Syrian Democratic Forces that suggest some of the Syrian rebels participating in Turkey’s offensive to capture territory in Syria may have committed war crimes.
The Turkish army is leading the incursion, but is relying heavily on Syrian rebels to provide the manpower for the effort to drive the Kurdish-led SDF away from Turkey’s border.
A separate video shows the fighters crowding round a black, bullet ridden SUV that had apparently come under a hail of gunfire before being forced to stop. As the fighters step over the body of a dead man in civilian clothing to reach inside the vehicle, a female voice is briefly heard coming from the back seat.
“Another fleeing pig has been liquidated by the hands of the National Army. He was fleeing in an armored car,” says one of the fighters as the others clamor to be filmed
What happened next is unclear, but the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said the woman in the car was Kurdish politician, Hevrin Khalaf, whose body was found later in the day in a nearby morgue. Khalaf was the secretary general of a newly established party, the Future Party of Syria.
A Turkish newspaper, Yeni Safak, trumpeted her killing as a “successful operation” against a politician affiliated with the “terrorist” People’s Democratic Union, the Kurdish political party that runs northeast Syria.
The newspaper said she had been “neutralized” in the operation, and described her death as a big setback for the group.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, a total of nine civilians were executed on Saturday at the roadblock to the south of the town of Tal Abyad. Several other photos and videos posted by the Ahrar al-Sharqiya rebel group, which was apparently among those involved in manning the roadblock, show captured men surrounded by fighters on the side of the road.
Ahrar al-Sharqiyeh is composed of fighters mostly from the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, much of which is currently controlled by the SDF.
The Syrian National Army, an umbrella group uniting a number of Syrian rebel factions, condemned the killing in a statement and said it had launched an investigation into what it said represented a violation of “the standards and values that we commit to.”
The videoed killing and others that may have occurred off camera almost certainly constitute a war crime, according to international law, and may breach one of the conditions Trump set for allowing the Turkish offensive to go ahead unhindered by U.S. troops in the area. In a tweet last week he cautioned the Turks not to undertake any “unforced or unnecessary fighting” or else they would face measures against their economy and currency.
Turkey views the Syrian Kurdish forces, which were key U.S. allies in the fight against the Islamic State, as a terrorist group on its doorstep and a threat to its national security.
LONDON — In Ireland, we say the past is never over. And it has come back to haunt us as the prospect of a disorderly Brexit looms.
I was 9 years old when the war we euphemistically call “the Troubles” began in Northern Ireland.
“Troubles” doesn’t come close to describing it.
I vividly recall the bloodstained images of the attack on civil rights marchers by police in 1968 that set off this terrible explosion of violence. It was a war that not only killed more than 3,700, it injured an estimated 47,000 people in at least 37,000 shootings and over 16,000 bombings.
Northern Ireland is a small place, around the size of Connecticut, where everyone, it’s said, knows everyone. The equivalent death toll per head of population in the United States would be around 750,000 people.
For those of us who were children when the Troubles began, who lived through its daily carnage and who believe lives are at stake in the Brexit drama, these are distressing times.
For more than 20 years there has been a fragile peace in Northern Ireland, based on the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which ended the conflict. But it’s also an international agreement the British government is threatening to break in its haste to tear itself away from the E.U., with or without a deal.
The Troubles were a communal trauma. My generation lived through it. Like most people, I knew many victims.
Liam Canning, 19, whom I played football with, was murdered by gunmen. Fourteen-year-old Rory Gormley, who was in my year at school, was shot and killed by militants who tried to murder his father.
Five members of a soccer club I played for were murdered. At another club I played for — a mixed team of Protestants and Catholics that dominated junior soccer for years — the toll was similar; one member was the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, who starved himself to death in 1981.
I heard shootings and bombings every week at my school in Central Belfast, close to an area known as “murder mile.”
I wore a school uniform whose colors we could strip off so that no-one could identify our religion and target us. My mother’s business in central Belfast was damaged by bomb attacks. In our late teens, my friends and I shunned pubs because of the danger of bombings; one of my friends had his legs blown off in one.
While I was in college, a prominent lawyer was murdered outside my building. As a young journalist I covered dozens of murders. I was warned by police of a credible death threat against me and several other reporters, and for months afterward I checked under my car for bombs and varied my route home.
So it’s personal, as it is for everyone in Northern Ireland watching the Brexit chaos and fearing the divorce may tear to shreds an imperfect but effective peace. Some may call it an exaggerated fear, but if you’ve lived through a war, you don’t forget the horrors easily.
A couple walks past a mural of Bobby Sands in the Falls Road on April 10, 2008, in Belfast.Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images file
Many of those who support Brexit appear certain these fears are overblown.
They reassure voters that the issue of the Irish border may be a thorny problem, but is not the trigger for renewed violence. British leaders promised repeatedly that there would never be a hard border of manned customs checkpoints across 310 miles, which could become the target for militants bent on erasing them.
But British Prime Minister Boris Johnson now says there will have to be a series of customs checks, away from the border.
It’s unclear how those checks would operate. There isn’t a frontier in the world where technology replaces checks, where barcodes replace a border. And Northern Ireland has 208 border crossings, an invisible line between the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland that runs along the middle of 11 roads, meets in the middle of three bridges and dissects two ferry crossings.
Astonishingly, there are more crossings in Ireland than along the entire border between the U.S. and Canada, and between the European Union and the countries to the east, where there are 137 crossings. During the Troubles, most of the Irish border roads were blown up or blocked with spikes.
Watchtowers, manned by British soldiers, loomed over the border, creating the feel of an open prison. Border residents often waited hours for security clearance to pass a border that today they can cross unhindered several times a day.
British Army Observation Post on the roof of a council tower block overlooking the republican New Lodge area of Belfast, Feb. 20, 1978.Alex Bowie / Getty Images file
There are no customs checks between two countries inside the E.U., and the vague and untested British proposals for an invisible border after Brexit have been consistently rejected by the E.U.
Brexit supporters insist all this can be easily solved.
One major hurdle to any agreement is that many in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland simply don’t trust the current leadership in the U.K., especially Johnson, who has a proven history of dishonesty.
They don’t believe recent British governments have understood the historical hornet’s nest they are stirring. Brexit conjures up old fears in Ireland of an English ruling class that will happily sacrifice the Irish on the altar of its own nationalist ambitions.
Take the prime minister who once compared the Irish border to the boundaries between two London boroughs, Camden and Westminster. He insisted that the border was not a complicated issue.
“It’s so small and there were so few firms that actually use that border regularly, it’s just beyond belief that we are allowing the tail to wag the dog,” Johnson said. “We are allowing the whole of our agenda to be dictated by this folly.”
Yet in office he has never visited the border of a province he governs.
One of Johnson’s first acts as prime minister was to renege on a commitment Britain made in December 2017 to keep Northern Ireland aligned with E.U. customs rules. When he was foreign secretary he asked why Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar “isn’t called Murphy, like all the rest of them.”
Johnson’s colleague in Brexit fundamentalism, lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg, has insisted he had no reason to go to the Irish border to inform his views.
“I don’t think my visiting the border is really going to give me a fundamental insight into the border beyond what one can get by studying it,” Rees-Mogg said.
Boys mill around a car they have just set on fire in Belfast in 1988.David Turnley / Corbis/VCG via Getty Images file
When Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage was asked if he had ever considered Northern Ireland during the referendum campaign in 2016, he admitted never giving it a moment‘s thought.
“No, no, no, what’s the problem? There is no problem,” he said.
These comments stir up old resentments among many in Ireland who believe there is a deep ignorance of the island’s history among English lawmakers and its elite.
As prime minister, Margaret Thatcher wanted the border redrawn with a straight line because it would be “easier to defend” than the real one with “all those kinks and wiggles in it,” according to her private secretary, Sir Charles Powell.
Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s former chancellor who chaired the campaign to leave the E.U., suggested before the 2016 referendum that he’d be happy if the Republic of Ireland said it had “made a mistake in getting independence in 1922” and came back in the United Kingdom.
Brexit supporters today deeply resent what they see as the stubbornness of the Irish leadership, backed by bureaucrats in Brussels, in not agreeing to their demands. The Johnson government has begun a campaign of blaming Dublin, Berlin, Brussels and Paris for its own inability to achieve a parliamentary solution to the Brexit crisis that Britain created.
When in trouble, blame the Irish.
Or, in that old and condescending English joke, whenever the Irish question was about to be solved, the Irish changed the question. In their desperation to leave the E.U., 59 percent of ruling Conservative Party members said they wanted Brexit to happen even if it meant breaking up the U.K., with Northern Ireland leaving and joining a united Ireland.
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Today’s Irish government sees its British counterparts, or at least the English nationalists behind them, as ignoring an inconvenient truth. And that is that the whole of the U.K. cannot leave the E.U.’s customs union without the return of a hard border in Ireland.
Jonathan Powell, Britain’s chief negotiator in Northern Ireland from 1997 to 2007, wrote recently, “Be under no misapprehension, there will have to be checks and there will be a hard border, which will undermine the basis on which the Good Friday Agreement was built.”
Which takes us back to the real unease at the possibility of a return to violence.
The British government is so worried about the resurgence of conflict in Northern Ireland that it has set the terror threat level at severe. The MI5 British security service now has more than 700 officers operating there. Hundreds of police officers from England and Scotland have been trained in anti-terror tactics in case they are needed for fast deployment.
The Republic of Ireland has just established a new armed police support unit along the border to prepare for Brexit.
There are indications that violence could be on its way back, and police in Northern Ireland have recently found bombs.
One was designed to lure police officers into an ambush. Another was found attached to a policeman’s car.
Two terror groups operate in Northern Ireland; one was responsible for the murder of a journalist, Lyra McKee, in April. Neither has much support, but violence, once unleashed, is a beast that’s hard to restrain. And it thrives in a political vacuum, which is what the region has today.
After a political battle unrelated to Brexit, Northern Ireland’s regional government collapsed. It is more than 1,000 days since its politicians sat in their Parliament. Work on health, education, housing and industry has stalled. Many people are resentful and feel abandoned, a potential pool of the discontented ripe for recruitment by unscrupulous extremists.
From Ireland to Iraq, terrorism has fed off the oxygen of grievance. And Brexit is feeding frustrations. One woman from the border town of Crossmaglen, a cockpit of violence during the Troubles, told me, “If the British impose a hard border here, let there be another war.”
Sinn Fein, which for decades defended the bombing and shooting campaign of the Irish Republican Army, says it “will not tolerate anything that resembles a border. The British government has been shown to be lying; what Boris Johnson is proposing is a significant hardening of the border.”
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams (fourth from left) and Sinn Fein deputy leader and alleged IRA chief of staff, Martin McGuinness (third from left) attend the funeral of an IRA volunteer in Buncrana, County Donegal, Ireland, Sept. 20, 1985.Kaveh Kazemi / Getty Images file
The feelings of injustice and resentment spring from hard fact.
In the 2016 Brexit referendum, 55.8 percent of the Northern Ireland electorate voted to remain in the E.U. But the overall U.K. vote, 52 percent to 48 percent, means that Northern Ireland will be exiting the E.U.against its will.
Its people are now divided about their future; in December 2017 a poll found that faced with a hard Brexit, 48 percent of Northern Ireland voters would opt to leave the U.K. and join a united Ireland, while 45 percent would rather stay in an exiting U.K. The proportion of those who prefer a united Ireland has since increased.
The ghosts of identity are being stirred again in a once deeply troubled land, ghosts laid to rest by the Good Friday Agreement, an international treaty signed by two sovereign nations. It was a deal built on a creative ambiguity; that residents north and south of the border could identify as British or Irish or European or any combination of the three, regardless of where they lived and what their religion or politics might be.
That delicate balance may soon be kicked to death by the binary brutality of Brexit.
Before her death at the hands of a militant gunman in Londonderry this year, Lyra McKee wrote: “We were the Good Friday Agreement generation, destined never to witness the horrors of war but to reap the spoils of peace. The spoils just never seemed to reach us.”
Now peace itself, not just its spoils, is threatened in Ireland.
And for those of us who lived through the terrible destruction of peace over three brutal decades, it’s a worrying prospect, and one that should horrify every lawmaker in Britain.
