Pieter Cleppe

MEPs have missed their chance to protect human rights

European Parliament (photo: iStock)

The European Parliament is always eager to lecture the world about human rights. To a degree, this annoys the world’s despots and we should, of course, never underestimate how ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’. But the Parliament’s overall influence on foreign affairs is still limited.

On Tuesday, however, MEPs received an opportunity to actually make a difference when it came to protecting human rights. The European Parliament had to decide whether to lift the immunity of three Catalan nationalist MEPs – former Catalan government leader Carles Puigdemont and former ministers Antoni Comín and Clara Ponsatí – that are facing criminal charges in Spain for their roles in organising an independence referendum in 2017. They fled to Belgium following the referendum and were elected to the European Parliament in 2019.

A majority of MEPs have now voted to strip the politicians of their parliamentary immunity, which means the Belgian courts will need to look at Spanish requests to extradite them again.

The idea of parliamentary immunity is that politicians should not be prosecuted for their political actions. Of course, parliament should have the power to lift this immunity when a non-political crime has been committed. The question at hand is whether the Catalonians are being subjected to a politicised prosecution. In the event, 42 per cent of MEPs still opposed lifting parliamentary immunity.

One important aspect is that ‘sedition’ and ‘rebellion’, the charges against the MEPs, are not crimes in Belgium. And the European Arrest Warrant says that one can only be extradited for something that is also a crime in the member state that is asked to extradite, in this case Belgium.

There is good reason to protect the Catalan MEPs from more judicial attempts to extradite them. Since 2017, the Belgian judiciary has rejected all of Spain’s extradition attempts.

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