The plenary session of Congress plans to begin this Tuesday the examination of the PSOE bill which proposes to reform the law regulating the right of association so that it can be dissolve entities such as the Francisco Franco Foundationa procedure which can be initiated at the request of the public prosecutor’s office and finalized only by a judicial resolution. With this initiative, the socialists respect the seventh additional provision of the Democratic Memory law, which dates from October 2022, and which already provided for the modification of the law on associations in this direction.
However, the reform arrives a year late since it should have been promoted no later than October 2023, i.e. twelve months after the entry into force of the Memory law. In order to speed up its approval, the socialists chose to promote the reform through a bill rather than a government bill. The PSOE proposal, collected by Europa Press, consists of the inclusion of an additional provision in the aforementioned norm to include as a cause of dissolution “the carry out activities which constitute an apology for Francoism“.
The future standard will specify that these apologies can be presented either “praising the 1936 coup d’état or the dictatorship that followed” or exalting their leaders by “contempt and humiliation of the dignity of the victims of the coup d’état, the civil war or the Franco regime” or by “direct or indirect incitement to hatred, to violence against them against or because of their status as victims.
By judicial resolution
This provision specifies that the dissolution must be carried out by judicial decision and that it will be the responsibility of the public prosecutor. “the exercise of action in this type of process”. Furthermore, the PSOE bill specifies that the reason for dissolution will be applied regardless of the theoretical objectives and activities stated in the statutes and whether or not the association in question has fulfilled the registration obligation, since it is intended for advertising purposes. only.
The spokesperson for the Socialist Group in Congress, Patxi López, stressed last Tuesday that this initiative would help everyone. “is portrayed” in relation to Francoism and in relation to the victims of the dictatorship. “Because either you are against the apology of Francoism, or you are in collusion with the dictatorship, or you are against the contempt for the victims, or you look the other way. And what is not worth spending the whole day to talk about certain victims, and give up and turn their backs on others,” he added.
