EXTRADITING former Catalan regional president Carles Puigdemont to Spain would carry grim echoes of the fascist past, German Left party MP Diether Dehm has warned.

Schleswig-Holstein’s attorney-general formally requested his extradition under a European arrest warrant yesterday. If courts decide that the Spanish charge of rebellion he faces is equivalent to the German offence of high treason, he can be sent to face trial.

But Mr Dehm said the request “does not keep the necessary distance” from the German judiciary’s “dreadful” past.
Catalonia’s civil war-era prime minister Lluis Companys was captured by the Gestapo in occupied France and handed over to the fascist government of Francisco Franco in 1940, he pointed out.

Mr Companys was tortured and then executed after a trial lasting less than an hour — a precedent consciously invoked by Spain’s ruling Popular Party (PP) after Mr Puigdemont called a unilateral referendum on Catalan independence last October.

PP deputy communications chief Pablo Casado then warned the Catalan leader against any declaration of independence, saying he “hoped” Mr Puigdemont would say nothing “so he will not end like the one who proclaimed [independence] 83 years ago,” referring to Mr Companys’s declaration of a Catalan Republic in 1934.

In Germany’s Junge Welt newspaper, international editor Andree Scheer pointed out that German lawyers alleging Mr Puigdemont’s actions in “conducting an unconstitutional referendum despite anticipated violent riots” would constitute treason in Germany had not mentioned the fact that the “violent riots on the day of the vote came exclusively from the Guardia Civil and the Spanish police.”