The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has dismissed the lawsuit filed by former Catalan president Artur Mas against Spain for the conviction imposed on him by the Catalan High Court (and later the Supreme Court) for organizing the illegal independence referendum on November 9, 2014. The unanimous decision of the judges in Strasbourg was due to Mas not responding in a timely manner to the questions posed by the magistrates reviewing his case, leading them to conclude that the plaintiff had decided to abandon his appeal. Mas was the president of the Catalan government when the illegal referendum was organized, despite being ordered to suspend it by the Constitutional Court. He was sentenced two and a half years later, in March 2017, to two years of disqualification from holding public office for disobedience. In December 2018, the Supreme Court reduced the sentence to 13 months, which Mas completed in February 2020.
Mas, the nationalist leader and political architect of the independence movement, became the first regional president to be convicted for disobeying a court ruling. He turned to the ECHR in April 2022 after exhausting all domestic avenues, with the Constitutional Court rejecting his appeal in 2021. Mas argued to the ECHR that the warning from the Constitutional Court in 2014, instructing the Catalan government not to hold the referendum, was not “sufficiently precise, specific, and categorical.” He contended that the Spanish courts did not meet the “clarity and predictability” required by Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which states that “no one shall be convicted of an act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offense at the time it was committed.”
Last year, the ECHR sent questions to all parties involved. The European judges sought to determine whether the law under which Mas was convicted for disobedience “satisfied the requirement of clarity and predictability” as per Article 7, and whether the actions for which he was convicted had a “criminal nature.” However, Mas’s defense did not follow the established procedures, leading to the ECHR’s decision to dismiss the case. Despite several reminders and deadlines, Mas did not respond to requests for further information and failed to provide any input to support his case, resulting in the ultimate dismissal of his appeal.
The ECHR concluded that, in the absence of any special circumstances relating to the protection of rights guaranteed by the Convention, there was no justification to continue analyzing Mas’s lawsuit. Therefore, the case has been removed from the list of pending cases and is now closed. Mas’s appeal is officially archived, marking the end of his legal battle at the international level. Mas completed his sentence in 2020 and is now eligible to resume holding public office, although he has not returned to that sphere since then. This decision by the ECHR represents the final chapter in Mas’s legal challenge against his conviction for organizing the illegal independence referendum in Catalonia.
