A useless ruling

The ruling from the Spanish Constitutional Court on the "Declaration of Sovereignty and for the Right to Decide of the people of Catalonia" is useless. The Declaration approved in the Catalan Parliament is already outside the Spanish legal framework, to which it makes no reference. It is rather an announcement made to the international community, where the Spanish Constitutional Court simply has no jurisdiction.

Quite often there's someone who asks "and when will the Catalan Parliament dare to break with Spain?" This is the question that always surprises me and that I generally answer by saying that it already did, on January 23, 2013. Precisely with this declaration. The members of Parliament voted at that time that "The Catalan people has, by reason of democratic legitimacy, political and legal sovereignty." and that changed—and in fact changes everything already—what happens from that point forward.

When a country, a human community, declares itself a "sovereign political and legal subject", what it is saying implicitly is that it doesn't recognize any sovereignty superior to its own. "Sovereign" is a word that cannot be questioned, it is not at all ambiguous in international law. And it is obvious that if a parliament doesn't recognize any sovereignty superior to its own than neither will it recognize a ruling that comes from a distinct sovereign power, in this case, the Spanish one.

And that doesn't depend on whether we are already independent or not. Sovereignty and independence are not synonyms. We have not achieved independence yet because we have not proclaimed it and therefore in consequence no one can yet recognize it. The Declaration of Sovereignty is precisely the foundational stone necessary for proclaiming it.

When the independence of Catalonia is proclaimed, if there is no agreement with Spain, it will be the other states, the 206 that there are in the world, who will decide if Catalonia is an independent state or not. It won't be Spain who decides if we are or are not independent, they will simply be one more actor next to 205 others. And this decision will be made not by studying if the process is in agreement with Spanish law but rather if it is in agreement with international law. And this is where the declaration of sovereignty is indispensable: no country can become independent before proclaiming its sovereignty.

director@vilaweb.cat

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When a country, a human community, declares itself a "sovereign political and legal subject", what it is saying implicitly is that it doesn't recognize any sovereignty superior to its own.