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Bloomberg
The European Court of Human Rights delivered a blow to the Catalan secessionist movement, ruling that in 2017 Spanish judges legally suspended a regional parliamentary session in the wake of a controversial independence vote.
The complaint brought by 76 people living in Barcelona was “manifestly ill-founded†and the Spanish judges’ move was legal, the Strasbourg, France-based human rights court said in a ruling.
“The suspension of the plenary sitting of the Parliament of the Autonomous Community of Catalonia had been ‘necessary in a democratic society,’ in particular in the interests of public safety, for the prevention of disorder and for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others,†the ECHR said in a summary of its ruling.
The October 2017 meeting was planned so that Catalan President Carles Puigdemont could evaluate the result of an referendum on Catalonia’s independence held days before.
The Spanish authorities had deemed the plebiscite illegal and moved to block it.