Carles Puigdemont’s arrest flares tensions in Catalonia

Remember the Catalonia issue? Up until a couple of days ago, you would have been forgiven for supposing it had all just magically been cleared up. But on Sunday, former pro-independence Catalan president Carles Puigdemont was detained by German police while on his way back from Finland to Belgium, where he has been in voluntary exile since last October.

German courts now have a couple of months to decide whether to return the secessionists’ poster-boy to his home country; if they do, he faces charges of rebellion and misuse of public funds in connection with the Catalan independence referendum he organised last October – a vote that was declared illegal by Spain’s highest court. The charge of rebellion carries a potential prison sentence of thirty years.

Reiterating Berlin’s faith in Spanish justice, Angela Merkel’s spokesman stated on Monday that “Spain is a democracy where the rule of law exists”. This is theoretically true.