The government spokesperson, Pilar Alegría, reacted this Tuesday to the two most current issues that affect the Executive – the legal reform that will mean the reduction of sentences for quarantine of ETA members and the resolution of the Court provincial of Madrid who approves the investigation. in contracts and in the chair of Begoña Gómez – slipping in various incorrect and false information about them.
During her weekly press conference, where she was accompanied on this occasion by the second vice-president of ETA, Yolanda Díaz, Alegría assured that the Council of State had approved in December the reform that will allow members of the ETA to benefit from this benefit (through an amendment by Sumar to the transposition of a European directive on exchange and basic information) and that the text is the same, “identical”, he came to say, to that approved by a Council of Ministers chaired by Mariano Rajoy in 2014. Both things are inaccurate, hoaxes or in any case, half-truths. What the Council of State, chaired by the former Vice-President of the Government, Carmen Calvo, approved, is the text that the Government approved, therefore before its parliamentary process and the amendments introduced, approved at the unanimity, in which the opposition parties, the PP and Vox have already assumed that it was their own error that they were asking to correct. And what the Rajoy Cabinet approved in the first instance is not the text which has sparked controversy in the last twenty-four hours and provoked indignation among victims of terrorism. This same PP government introduced an additional provision, after the adoption of the text in the Council of Ministers, precisely to prevent ETA members from benefiting from this advantage and so that the years of prison served in France could be deducted from their penalty, and it is this provision that was ultimately modified. Another blatant lie comes from the table of the Council of Ministers, where Alegría avoided specifying if, as the opposition demands, something will be done to reverse the situation, even if Moncloa sources assume the consequences of the reform .
Regarding the decision of the Provincial Court regarding the investigation that concerns the wife of Pedro Sánchez, Alegría predicted that the file would be filed and declared that the Court qualifies the investigation opened by Judge Juan Carlos Peinado as prospective. It’s not like that. The Court itself ruled on the matter as follows, against the arguments of Gómez’s defense and the Executive: “Prospective is the investigation that begins indeterminately in search of possible criminal conduct without a minimum of specificity and well-founded suspicion, but without that which, based on rationally suspicious behavior (exercise of influence or promise of exercise to condition public decision-making in exchange for undue advantages), opens a vast investigation .
The PSOE spokesperson in Congress, Patxi López, said that the law is “a fundamental element” to standardize Spain with the rest of European countries, even if the bill that the government presented to the Cortes does not did not originally include the amendment which removes the only additional provision included in the text and which prevented ETA members’ prison sentences from being commuted for years spent in foreign prisons.
In a game of confusion, López told half-truths to say that this modification had to be made, like it or not, yes or yes. “I understand the sensitivity and emotionality of the victims at this time,” he declared, but he defended the approval of the amendment which will mean the reduction of 380 years in prison for forty ETA members , whether or not they have blood crimes behind them. .back. The socialist deputy, with reference to the Parot doctrine, affirmed that this is not the first time that European justice has hit Spain, but he did so ignoring that both the European Court of Human Rights that the Court of Justice of the European Union argued that the sentences of ETA members who had already spent years in prison abroad should not be commuted.
“I am not an expert in law, but there is a maxim that says that a prisoner cannot serve two sentences for the same crime,” said López, while the truth is that in France terrorists have been convicted for belonging to a terrorist organization and, later, in Spain, he served sentences, in some cases, for murder. In any case, it is not a question of a double punishment for the same facts, as López suggests, but the stay in prison of the members of ETA is due to different motivations and not only to those for which they have already been tried in the neighboring country.
López, like Alegría, insisted that the reform was approved unanimously — because neither the PP, nor Vox nor the UPN realized what this amendment implied — and denied that it meant the reduction of sentences, but rather the completion of the years of sentence. in Spain, without taking into account those already adopted in France for different acts – although he spoke of the “same crime” -. In the specific case of Javier García Gaztelu, known as Txapote and responsible for twelve assassinations, including those of Fernando Múgica and Miguel Ángel Blanco, López also denied that the fact that, if, as everything indicates, he ends by being approved, It is a reduction of this reform, he will be able to leave prison within a year instead of 2030. “He has already served those years,” he said, referring to his stay in a French prison for six years and nine months.
