A FORMER Portuguese diplomat has urged Spain to immediately release nine Catalan political prisoners who are in Madrid jails for their role in October’s independence referendum.

Ana Gomes, who is now a Member of the European Parliament for the Portuguese Socialist Party said the plight of the prisoners was “devastating” and gave a negative image of Spain abroad.

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She told the Catalan News Agency (ACN): “They did not use violence, violence was actually used against them, it’s definitely not good for Spain nor Europe to have political prisoners. I always believed that the accusations against them, despite being filed by the prosecutor, are politically manipulated, politically biased.”

Gomes said the prisoners should be playing a major part in the forthcoming July 9 meeting between Catalan President Quim Torra and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

She said transferring them to institutions closer to their homes, as had been suggested by the new Spanish Government, was not enough.

“I hope these talks will mean more than just the transfer of prisoners. I hope they will mean their liberation,” she said.

“I hope to see it as an immediate consequence of the talks between Sanchez and Torra.”

Gomes said that while she welcomed a socialist government in Spain, Sanchez should “be able to sit down with the Catalan leadership and work out a democratic solution”.

She said she and her colleagues had tried for months to seek permission to visit the prisoners in jail, having worked alongside one of them – former Foreign Affairs Minister Raul Romeva when he was a MEP – but was awaiting a response from authorities. “I want to visit him, he is my friend,” she said. “It’s sad, I have insisted many times. It’s really weird that European authorities, in this case Spain, do not deliver on our request, my own and that from other colleagues, to go and visit the prisoners.”

Sanchez has said he will work to “restore confidence” between central government in Madrid and the Catalan Government and wants to open a “bilateral dialogue” with Torra.

He did not say if he would discuss the thorny subject of self-determination, but pledged to revisit laws passed by the Catalan Parliament that were suspended after the previous Spanish administration challenged them in the Constitutional Court.

He told journalists in Paris: “These laws can obviously be examined by the Spanish government in the framework of a bilateral dialogue with the Catalan executive.”

They include measures on climate change, energy poverty or equality between the sexes and were challenged by Mariano Rajoy’s People’s Party (PP) government on the grounds that they were beyond the remit and powers of the Catalan government.

Christopher Marchand, meanwhile, one of the Belgian lawyers for former Catalan ministers exiled in Brussels, said there were “flagrant violations of fundamental rights” in the Spanish case against pro-independence leaders. He said some decision by Pablo Llarena, the Spanish Supreme Court judge in charge of the case, were “in contradiction with the basic rights of the European Union”.