The Constitutional Court rejected the request of the family of a victim of the Transition to reopen the investigation into his death during a police charge in Madrid in 1976. The court of guarantees, as elDiario.es learned , has inadmissible the appeal of Relatives of Ángel Almazán against the filing of a legal complaint regarding his death. Almazán, a resident of Vallecas who was then 18 years old, died at the hands of riot police during a demonstration in 1976 during the Transition and the plenary assembly declared his appeal inadmissible, applying the same arguments as those used to reject similar petitions. of those who responded with the Franco dictatorship.
Ángel Almazán died in December 1976. The young Madrid native had participated in a demonstration called by the Spanish Labor Party to protest in Santa Engracia against the referendum on political reform. The memory groups point out that he was taken to a doctor by the very riot police who beat him, but specifying in the police report that “he had hit himself with a lamppost.” He died a few days later in La Paz hospital.
As happened in dozens of criminal cases linked to the dictatorship, judges refused to investigate Almazán’s death when his family went to court to demand criminal accountability. His brother’s complaint even identified by first and last name several police officers who fired smoke bombs and rubber bullets at Almazán, then restrained and beat him. An autopsy revealed that he died from a fractured skull.
In Almazán’s case, the courts already analyzed a first complaint from his parents in the same year 1976, but this case was archived by a military court. Already in 2009, the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero recognized his right to “reparation and personal recognition” on the basis of the law on historical memory. It was his brother Javier who returned to court in 2021 to request the opening of an effective investigation. The Madrid court which took up the case ordered the opening of the file, recognizing that his death was a crime but that there is “no reason to attribute the commission of the crime to a person in particular”.
His brother brought Ángel Almazán’s case to the Constitutional Court with the help of lawyers Ángeles López and Nieves Sanz, denouncing, among other things, that his right to effective judicial protection had been violated by not opening a case then that he had no doubt about its existence. of a crime: “This confidence in Justice and its work of social pacification is frustrated. This confidence in Justice and its work of social pacification is frustrated,” indicates the appeal, among other arguments.
The plenary session of the Constitutional Court, as elDiario.es learned, today analyzed the appeal of Almazán’s family and issued an order that rejects their allegations, definitively closing the door to the investigation requested by his brother. These same sources explain that the criterion applied is the same as that used by the Constitutional Court in recent months to reject criminal investigations into the crimes of the Franco regime.
From the case of Ventura to that of Almazán
The same plenary session of the Constitutional Court decided last May that this type of claim from victims of police brutality or the Franco regime under the dictatorship could not prosper. The magistrates, with several votes against, rejected Francisco Ventura’s appeal against the decision of the courts of the Valencian Community not to reopen the investigation into the torture and repression he suffered in Valencia in 1967. Inadmissibility meant that the matter was not even resolved by a decision on the merits of the case.
This is a doctrine that the Constitutional Court had already deployed in several cases in recent years, even with the entry into force of the new Democratic Memory Law, highlighting the case of Gerardo Iglesias, founder of Izquierda Unida who denounced a police officer for torture during Francoism. The case of Francisco Ventura ended in the rejection of the Constitutional Court with similar arguments: the new law does not “replace” the judges’ criteria and the obstacles remain the same: the passage of time and the amnesty of 1977 .
In the case of Ángel Almazán, a young Vallecano who died at the hands of the police already during the Transition in 1976 in the streets of Madrid during a demonstration, the plenary session refers to this order from the Ventura case to reproduce its arguments and his refusal. Several dissenting magistrates maintain the opinion already expressed then in their dissenting opinions: that these cases deserve, at least, to be admitted to processing to receive a decision on the merits of the case from the Constitutional Court.
