The Belgian parliament receives the Catalan government to find out about the Independence process

The Belgian Parliament’s Foreign Relations Commission today received a delegation from the Catalan government to be informed on the independence process. It was this commission responsible for international relations in Belgium that sent the invitation to the government. The Government Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Roger Albinyana, and the Secretary General of Diplocat, Albert Royo, appeared before 14 of the 17 deputies of the Foreign Relations Commission of the federal chamber on the request of its president, the Flemish socialist Dirk Van Der Maelen, to report on the elections of 27-S and to answer their questions. The event was also attended by the permanent delegate of the Government of Catalonia in the EU, Amadeu Altafaj, and the deputies included both Walloons and Flemish.

The Belgian is now the sixth parliament to discuss the Catalan case, following the Irish, Danish, Paraguayan, Uruguayan and United States’ in recent weeks. The Spanish ambassador in Belgium protested at the appearance.

‘We are delighted to have received a Catalan delegation, we are a very open parliament and we want to talk to everyone. We think it is very important to know exactly what is happening in Catalonia and today we have got a lot of answers, so we are satisfied’, the deputy for the N-VA Peter Luykx, a member of the Foreign Affairs Commission, explained after the meeting. Luykx assured that the Catalan process ‘is very democratic, and, as everyone has seen, has a large majority of people giving it support. The process will last eighteen months, until 2017, so we have a lot of time to follow it, but if there is a democratic majority obviously it will find support’, he declared.

Royo talked about how Catalonia has come this far and how it is that a people like the Catalan people should consider going ahead with such a process, explaining the sentence against the ‘Estatut’ and the great mobilisations in the years following. Albinyana talked about the road map planned for after the 27-S and Amadeu Altafaj discussed questions on Europe.

The deputies asked the representatives of the Catalan government for information on how a Catalan state might fit into the EU, about the possible reactions from the Spanish state, about the road map for after the 27-S, the surveys published up to this time and about whether a change of majority in the Spanish parliament might make it easier to reach agreements.