The prosecution turned to the Constitutional Court to ask it to reconsider its recurring refusal to allow judges to effectively investigate the crimes of the Franco regime. The Public Prosecutor’s Office appealed to the Court of Guarantees against the complaint filed by two brothers who claim to have been tortured by the Politico-Social Brigade of Barcelona in 1971. This request comes after the Constitutional Court closed several similar cases of police officers. abuse, both under the Franco regime and during the transition, explaining that the crimes reported have expired and that in addition, the effects of the 1977 amnesty also complicate your research.
The case that now arrives in the hands of the Guarantee Court is that of the brothers José Pablo and María Isabel Ferrándiz. Opponents of the regime of the Obrer Front and the Young Red Guard of the International Communist Party, they were arrested in April 1971 at their home and placed at the disposal of the Politico-Social Brigade of the Vía Laietana police headquarters, in Barcelona, current headquarters of the police headquarters of Catalonia.
There, according to them, they were subjected to physical and psychological torture in addition to poor hygiene and food conditions between interrogations which had a single objective: “To obtain information on the political activism of other people in the PCE-I and its organization. “. Both were imprisoned, he in La Modelo and she in La Trinitat Vella, where the episodes of violence continued until their release from prison in 1972 and their pardon in 1975.
In their complaint, the Ferrándiz brothers identified the police officers they accused of participating in the arrest and investigation against them. A case that arrived before a Barcelona court at the end of 2023, once the Democratic Memory Law came into force, which opted for inadmissibility in March 2024 invoking an argument that crosses all these processes: the crime attributed to the police was This It was not until 2004, well after the events, that the limitation period for the events that occurred half a century ago was implemented and finally the application of the amnesty law of 1977. The Barcelona court rejected the appeals and confirmed the filing of the case.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office at the Constitutional Court, in coordination with the Prosecutor’s Office specialized in Democratic Memory, decided to bring the case before the Constitutional Court. The law, he explains in his appeal, recognizes the right of victims of the Franco regime to obtain from justice “an effective investigation which results in the establishment of facts on a reality that occurred in the past, with reference to the repression carried out by the State.” The court, when filing this case, made no mention of the law on democratic memory. “What is necessary is to open an investigation and, once the facts are defined , agree on what is appropriate.”
Cases rejected by the Constitutional Court
The prosecutor’s request in the case of the Ferrándiz twins comes after the Constitutional Court, in several orders and rulings, closed the door to this type of request: that of the courts and tribunals to investigate the crimes committed by the Franco regime. Due to the statute of limitations for crimes, the non-existence of certain types of criminals at the time when the events occurred and, finally, the insurmountable wall of the 1977 amnesty law.
In recent months, the Constitutional Court has rejected, with internal division, the appeals of two reprisals. One of them is that of Francisco Ventura, an anti-Franco activist arrested and imprisoned in Valencia at the end of the 1960s. In the other case, revealed by elDiario.es, the magistrates rejected the request of the young man’s family Ángel Almazán that his death at the hands of the police during a demonstration in Madrid be effectively investigated during the Transition.
The decisions of the Constitutional Court were not unanimous and were the subject of an individual vote against progressive magistrates like Ramón Sáez or María Luisa Balaguer, who for years have supported the need for these appeals to be at least admitted for treatment and judgment. The debate on the merits of the case decides whether the courts should, at least, effectively investigate the crimes of the dictatorship.
