The President warns that Esquerra’s conditions are “far from being met”

“I wish to make one thing very clear: it is a mistake to think that the dismissal of the director of Spain’s National Intelligence Center (CNI) ends the assumption of responsibilities, the necessary transparency that is not yet forthcoming, and the assurance that there will be no recurrence.”

That is how the leader of Catalonia’s Generalitat government, President Pere Aragonès, put it in Question Time in the Catalan Parliament on Wednesday. Mr Aragonés, who is also Esquerra’s National Coordinator, put forward the conditions that the party has set on the table. “And they are far from being fulfilled.” Therefore, he warned, “Without transparency, the assumption of responsibilities, and the assurance that there will be no recurrence, no one can consider the Pegasus crisis diminished or resolved.”

Esquerra thus demands the following:

1. Transparency. Because the Official Secrets Committee of the Spanish Congress has not provided information, only leaks, “We demand that the magistrate’s decisions to spy on us be declassified,” said Mr Aragonés. “They talk about 18 people, but there are many more, more than sixty; there have been no answers in this regard,” he insisted.
2. Assumption of political responsibilities. “We want to know who was in on the case, who ordered it, and who allowed the espionage, and that they answer for it,” he said.
3. Assurance that there will be no recurrence. “If defending our right to self-determination and amnesty in a process of dialogue, some of us were considered a threat in 2019 [when they were spied on with Pegasus software], today we still defend the same thing—independence, self-determination and amnesty. That means that now, if that view is held, we continue to be a threat to this Spain that has been construed thus, in which we deserve to continue having our privacy breached,” concluded Mr Aragonés in Parliament.