Today the European Court of Justice (the highest European court) announced its ruling on the detention of Oriol Junqueras. Ultimately, the ruling means that the immunity that Oriol Junqueras has gained through his election to the European Parliament has been violated by the detention in which Junqueras is sitting. Junqueras is therefore illegally in custody.

Also today, the Catalan President Quim Torra was sentenced by the highest Catalan(!) court to a year and a half's ban from public office^[1] for refusing to comply with the order to remove the yellow ribbons of the separatist movement from public buildings during the national parliamentary elections. He refused that order and let them illegally hang there.

I am not a lawyer and therefore I do not want to evaluate the judgments myself. But I do think that politicians should follow the verdicts like we ordinary citizens have to.

I am curious to know whether Junqueras will be released from prison immediately or whether the Spanish nationalists will manage to come up with a few more legal tricks to prevent this from happening.

In the same way, I expect Torra to resign from office immediately and follow the ban on holding public office of any kind. But he will now probably first go to the Spanish supreme court, which he usually fights against. Will the sentence of this court come when Torra's term of office is over anyway?

What can a simple citizen learn from this? See headline?

In any case, one can learn that both, Madrid and Barcelona, use this conflict to distract from Spain's main problems.