Imprisonment of Catalan Leaders

Debate between Peter Grant and Christopher Pincher

Tuesday 15th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

The legal framework of Spain is a matter for Spain. Its courts, as I said earlier, are open and transparent. Spain has a robust legal infrastructure that allows for right of appeal, and we support its infrastructure.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Gràcies—thank you—Madam Deputy Speaker. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams) for securing this urgent question.

It is all very well for the Minister to hide behind the constitutionality of what has been done, but could I gently remind him that some of the most unspeakable acts of evil that Europe saw in the 20th century, and that the United States and South Africa have seen, were constitutional and legal? Being constitutional does not make something either legally or morally defensible.

Many of these people are our equivalents. They are Members of Parliament, they are Government Ministers, they are the Speaker of the Catalan Parliament, whose only offence was to seek to implement the mandate they had been given by their people in a free, fair and democratic election. The question is not whether we think that Catalonia should or should not be independent; it is whether we, as parliamentarians, are prepared to stand up and defend the right of parliamentarians across the world to say things that Governments do not like and to implement the policies that their people have put them there to implement without fear of arrest and imprisonment.

Any political system—any constitution—that allows parliamentarians to be arrested for being parliamentarians is a constitution that is not fit for purpose and that needs urgent change. In the case of the constitution of Spain and of Catalonia, the only legitimate vehicle for that constitution to change is through the ballot box. While it is not for us to decide the future of Catalonia, as it is for nobody other than the people of Catalonia to decide that, I stand with the people of Catalonia—estic amb Catalunya—in their right to determine their own future and to do so in a free, fair and democratic process.

Does the Minister agree that the right of self-determination and the right to freedom of assembly are fundamental to the concept of modern human rights? Does he accept that sending armed police to break up peaceful demonstrations sets the wrong tone and is likely to inflame the situation rather than to encourage peaceful and legal dialogue? Will he even attempt to persuade the Government of Spain that the way to resolve this crisis is through the democratic political process and not through the criminal justice system? What conversations has he had with his Spanish counterpart, and with his counterparts throughout the rest of the European Union, to remind them that the founding principle of the European Union is that all peoples have the right of self-determination and that any state that impinges on those rights through the use of force should not be supported by this or any other democratic Government?

[Christopher Pincher]

The question of whether the referendum in Catalonia was legal is quite clear: it was not legal. It was marked down by the Spanish courts who said that it was illegal. The MPs who decided to use public funds for that illegal referendum knew what they were doing. They knew that they should not have done it. They knew that they were breaking the law. Therefore, they must accept that the law will be done.

In terms of the rights of people to assemble, the rights of people to protest and the way in which police action has occurred in Catalonia, as the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) said, I would encourage great care to be taken in the policing of these events. We, in our own country, know how very important it is to allow people to protest peaceably and then to encourage them to disperse in a similar way, so I would certainly encourage our Spanish friends to do that.

Have I had conversations with the Spanish Government and with the Spanish authorities here? Yes, I have discussed diplomatically with the Spanish ambassador the likely outcome of the court action that we heard of yesterday, and I shall be talking to him again, I am sure, in the next weeks or months.