The PSOE has requested a two-week extension to negotiate with Junts a new opinion on the amnesty, whose deadline for issuance expires on Wednesday.
This Saturday the deadline to claim a temporary extension ended, and the socialist parliamentary group has asked the Congressional Board for an extension that will begin to run on the 21st. Socialist sources explain that the letter, delivered on Saturday and signed by the spokesperson deputy, Montse Mínguez García, represents an extension that “offers more margin of negotiation time to the groups, in the event that an agreement is not reached before February 21.”
Junts per Catalunya and the PSOE have accelerated contacts in recent days to agree on a tweak to the amnesty law that will iron out the differences that separate the two parties.
The main obstacle continues to be in the wording of the law, which Junts wants to tweak to have the absolute guarantee that Carles Puigdemont, its leader, and others implicated in different cases of terrorism or high treason, crimes that would be outside the amnesty, will not They are forced to enter preventive detention once the measure is approved.
The Government insists that this is already guaranteed in the current wording of the law, because it will be impossible to prove that Puigdemont and others had the "direct intention" to kill, and they also believe that the procedure for high treason for the so-called Russian plot will remain in place. nothing because after six and a half years there seems to be no solid evidence.
Junts is pressing to retouch the crime of terrorism, an apparently immovable red line for the PSOE, but also demands to explore other of its amendments that, in its opinion, guaranteed that the judges would really apply the amnesty as soon as they approved it and would lift any precautionary measure, including the European warrants against Puigdemont or any temptation to send him to preventive detention if he returns to Spain.
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The discussion continues and the socialists insist that the law is fine as it is, and in this they have the support of ERC.
Junts sources insist that a way must be found to restrict the judges' margin of discretion.
The effort is to incorporate a technical solution that, until the amnesty takes full effect, avoids the provisional detention of those involved in any case related to the
process
.