Rovira: “I will spend years here”

The secretary general of ERC, Marta Rovira, is resigned to spending a lengthy time in exile. Her admission came yesterday during a moving interview with the news ACN, in a statement filled with sentiment when she said: “What saddens me is that I do not know when I will return. I am aware that I will be gone for many years, that I left behind a lot of people I love, my country, my city and my family and that I will have to make a major change of life.” The wellbeing of her seven-year-old daughter is one of the reasons that led her to go into exile.

Rovira stresses that she is in Switzerland with the objective of continuing the fight against “brutal political persecution”, to regain freedom of expression and to ensure civil and political rights in Catalonia.

Since her departure, ERC’s number two has been establishing herself in Switzerland through her lawyer, Jean-Marc Carnicé, former head of the Bar Association of Geneva and a specialist in extraditions. The first step in his strategy was to approach the “relevant authorities” to seek protection arguing that his client had escaped from “political persecution”.

Rovira said that she was “forced” to choose the path of “exile” with the conviction that Supreme Court judge, Pablo Llarena, would imprison her. Rovira said that for months in Catalonaia she had felt “coerced and threatened,” and acknowledged that she was censoring and “restraining” herself. “I believe I have come here in part to restore freedom of expression, to exercise of my civil and political rights, because in Catalonia that was virtually impossible,” she stressed at different times in the interview. On the question of requesting political asylum, Rovira said she was studying the possibility but had not yet made a decision.