Lawfare Judicial Warfare in Spain: The Strategy of Repression Against the Catalan Independence Movement

For centuries, the Spanish state has proved to be an expert system for repressing political dissent and any threat that could jeopardize the maintenance of the status quo. It has done so using all the institutions and all the areas of power that were necessary, for the end has always justified the means. Carles Mundo, Catalan Minister of Justice, 2016-2017. There is no book in Spain that talks about lawfare. Nor is there a book that deals with the system of judicial repression of political dissidence deployed by the Franco regime. Nor is there a book that denounces the judicial system inherited from the dictatorial regime and that was later embodied in the 1978 Constitution. Lawfare (the combination of law and warfare) thus fills a void to the extent that it penetrates the authoritarian judicial system and highlights the democratic deficits of the Spanish judiciary. The politicization of justice began with the appointment, as president of the Constitutional Court, of a prominent member of the Peoples Party (Partido Popular PP) in 2013. Thereon started a process of judicialization of politics via reform of the Organic Law of the Court Constitutional. The referendums of November 9, 2014 and October 1, 2017 entailed the criminalization of the Catalan independence movement and a drastic reduction in fundamental rights linked to the exercise of political choice. This was confirmed by the judgment handed down by the Supreme Court in 2019, culminating in a lawfare strategy that has led to the criminal conviction of two presidents of the Generalitat Artur Mas and Joaquim Torra and the exile of a third president, Carles Puigdemont. Lawfare is the first book to link in a broad way the thinking of German jurists of the Nazi period to the training of judges in Spain both up to and during the Franco regime, and beyond. Published in collaboration with the Department of International History, London School of Economics See more